By 1896, Ridgway's prosperity, drawn from the region's forests, waters, and land, had transformed the community into a town of 2,500 residents with three newspapers, abundant stores and hotels, eight churches, and 24 manufacturing businesses producing lumber, leather, heavy machinery, millwork, ice cream, bricks, flour, medicines, carriages, and candy. Twenty years earlier, Joseph Smith Hyde had opened Ridgway's first opera house on the third floor of the Hall, Kaul, and Hyde Store, and several other performance halls followed, but the Ridgway Opera House, designed by Walter P. Murphy and H. C. Park and meticulously crafted by the Hyde-Murphy Company in 1897, was the grandest of them all. Although William H. Hyde and O. B. Grant owned it, Walter P. Murphy was remembered as the Father of the New Opera House for the vision that shaped the building. The Ridgway Opera House seated 1,163 people for plays, vaudeville acts, musicals, operas, and concerts. On opening night, April 20, 1897, sage-green French brocade framed an intricately hand-painted stage curtain, salmon-colored French damask softened the tiered box seats, light olive velours draped the entrance and promenade, and a $1,500 Chickering piano awaited its first performance as an eager audience watched A Texas Steer, the first of many productions staged there. Eight years after the grand opening, an arsonist set fire to the opera house and destroyed it, but the owners rebuilt it. In 1926, it became known as the Strand Theatre, a show house for silent movies and, by the early 30s, talkies.