Built in 1877 on the historic Maplewood Farm site by Boone County farmer and stock breeder Slater Ensor Lenoir, Maplewood Barn was part of a working farm with unique feeding troughs and ample storage for animals and hay. The barn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places along with Maplewood House in 1976. Beginning in July 1973, it also became the home of summer stock theater, a role it held until it burned to the ground in April 2010. For more than 30 years, Maplewood Barn Theatre offered audiences performances ranging from poetry readings and musical theater to comedy, variety shows, and Shakespeare. After the fire, Columbia Parks and Recreation rebuilt the barn with contributions from private donors, and it was rededicated in May 2012. The theater grew from efforts to create a multi-purpose community resource after community leaders, including the Boone County Historical Society and the Columbia Art League, encouraged the city to purchase the 58 acre property in 1970. Inspired in part by Home Sweet Home in Bardstown, Kentucky, and the Wolf Trap performing arts park in Virginia, arts advocates explored the site's cultural possibilities, and a proposed theater appeared in the November 8, 1970 dedication program. In March 1973, Randall Bane, who had acted and danced professionally in New York and St. Louis before moving to Columbia to finish his master's degree on the G.I. Bill, submitted a proposal with sketches for a summer theater at the barn. The next month, a 12-member Maplewood Barn Theatre Advisory Committee was authorized, with representatives from Columbia's Art League, Chamber of Commerce, Parks and Recreation Department, and the university, and Carolyn Waters became its first president. Bane recruited volunteers for the Barnplayer Company, and after only three weeks of rehearsals and construction work donated by local contractors, the 12-performance inaugural season opened on July 21, 1973 despite the threat of rain. It featured Trial by Haunted House, a 45-minute commedia dell arte improvisational comedy, followed by Passages, a series of Tschaikovsky-inspired dances by the Mid-Missouri Dance Theatre troupe. In the early years, hay bales separated performers from audiences, there were no lights so shows ended before dark, packed dirt remained indoors until a concrete floor was added in the late 1980s, stalls became dressing rooms, feeding bins held props and scenery, and the hayloft served as a prop room while its double loft doors were often used theatrically. A second, more ambitious season ran from July 12 to August 5, 1974 and included a variety show, a poetry reading night, more commedia, dance, and the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Although Maplewood's board of directors briefly considered moving in the mid-1980s and again in the mid-1990s, cost, legal, and political problems prevented relocation, and the 2010 fire and the community campaign to rebuild helped secure the future of community theater at its traditional home in Nifong Park.