“It was Escape. It was the Theatre.” The James Adams Floating Theatre

The Museum of the Albemarle opens its newest small case exhibition on April 1, 2025, featuring artifacts related to the James Adams Floating Theatre. In 1925 Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber visited the grand vessel while it was docked in North Carolina. Her interviews and research there would become a key foundation for her award-winning book Show Boat, a best-selling novel about Mississippi steamboats, love, racial prejudice, and adventure. Her novel later inspired plays, musicals, movies, and songs.

Ferber once wrote, “Innocence wore golden curls. Wickedness wore black. Love triumphed, right conquered, virtue was rewarded, evil punished. Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. . . . It was Escape. It was the Theatre.”

Launched in 1914 from Washington, NC, the traveling vaudeville showboat entertained ticketholders in communities along rivers and sounds from New Jersey to Florida. Northeastern North Carolina towns—such as Bath, Manteo, Colerain, and Elizabeth City—were entertained with live plays, music, ventriloquism, acrobatics, and magic performances up to six nights a week.

In the early years, up to 850 guests could enjoy the shows. That number decreased to 442 in 1940 due to renovations. After several sinkings due to the weather or striking submerged objects, the showboat burned and sank one final time in Georgia in 1941.

This exhibit features a trunk used by repertoire actor and drummer Raymond Coopersmith, a typewriter and top hat worn by writer and director Charlie Hunter, programs, a theatre cash box, and show tickets. The exhibition, which runs for a year, is free and open to the public.