For a lot of schoolchildren, history is just plain boring – but not for the budding geniuses in the Aquinas Honor Society at the Immaculate Conception School in Jamaica Estates.
They stumbled over a little bit of history on the Internet and decided to recover it.
What they found on an auction site was an 1877 handbill for a production of “Hamlet” at the Bowery Theatre in Manhattan. It starred a noted Shakespearean actor of the time, Count Joannes, with his protégé and faithful student Avonia Fairbanks playing the star-crossed lover, Ophelia.
Although the Count, who was born in England as George Jones in 1810 wasn’t really royalty (he was knighted by a Prussian ambassador), he was a major stage performer. During the height of his career in the 1870s he performed for Emperor Napoleon II.
The Count, however, died broke in 1879 – but thanks to the charity of friends and the devoted Miss Fairbanks, he was buried in Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens.
It turns out that one of the kids’ faculty advisors, Carl Ballenas, is also the official historian for Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens. The plot, as they say, thickened.
In doing their research, the students discovered that Avonia Fairbanks was related to the noted Fairbanks Family of Massachusetts.
The Fairbanks House, now a museum, is located in Dedham, Massachusetts and is the oldest timber-frame house in North America. It began in 1637 and built as a family home by Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks.
The climax of the story is that each student made a donation and pooled their resources to submit the winning bid for the handbill.
In a happy ending, the school made contact with Alexandra Service, the Director/Curator of The Fairbanks House, and the handbill was donated to the museum’s historical archives.
Sadly, there was no happy ending for the Bowery Theater, one of the most opulent and largest venues in the country at the time. The 3,500-seat temple of drama that sat just south of Canal Street had several major fires during its existence.
As the Thalia Theatre, the building burned to the ground in 1929. Today, a Yummy Noodles stands on the spot.
