In the early twentieth century, touring theatrical companies needed a network of houses between the big cities, places where a leading lady could play one night, sleep on a train, and open in the next town the day after. Lynchburg, a tobacco and rail town of seven hills above the James River, was perfectly placed for that kind of work. The Academy of Music gave traveling productions a proper Beaux-Arts stage with a deep proscenium and the kind of acoustics that let a soft voice carry to the gallery. Anna Pavlova, the Russian ballerina who carried Swan Lake to audiences who had never seen ballet before, danced on this floor. Sarah Bernhardt, by then aging and using a wooden leg, played her famous declamatory roles in French to crowds who mostly did not speak the language and applauded anyway. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, John Drew, Otis Skinner, DeWolf Hopper, Alma Gluck — the bill reads like a directory of the late Edwardian stage.

Frye & Chesterman designed in the Beaux-Arts vocabulary that was fashionable for public buildings around the turn of the century, an American take on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The exterior runs three stories of dressed stone and brick. The interior was Neoclassical: a deep horseshoe of seats facing a proscenium framed in plaster ornament, with two tiers of boxes flanking the stage. The detailing was meant to do what European opera houses did, which was to make ordinary citizens feel briefly like guests of a small republic of refinement. The theater seated a little over a thousand. When the house lights went down, the gilt caught the footlights and the room glowed.

The Academy stopped functioning as a touring house in the mid-twentieth century, as live theater gave way to motion pictures and then television. For decades the building sat in various states of use and disrepair, its mechanical systems failing, its plaster cracking, its paint peeling. The National Register of Historic Places listed it in 1969, which helped slow the decline but did not pay for repairs. The Lynchburg Academy of Fine Arts spent years scraping together restoration money. In 2008 a federal earmark of $245,000 from the Community Development Fund of HUD, secured by Representative Bob Goodlatte, went toward the work. Today the Academy operates as part of the Academy Center of the Arts, a venue for music, theater, and community programming downtown.

Most of the legitimate theaters built in Virginia between 1890 and 1915 are gone. They were torn down to widen streets, converted to discount stores, lost to fires, or simply allowed to collapse. The Academy of Music is one of the only ones still standing, still functioning, still hosting performers on the stage it was built for. The building is a kind of physical memory of a moment when traveling companies criss-crossed the American South, when small cities expected and received world-class artists, and when a Polish pianist could come to Lynchburg, play Chopin, and disappear back into the night by rail.