Thanks Alan!

TOPSHAM, Vt. — They served as backdrops for countless high school performances of "A Christmas Carol" at the town hall here, and elsewhere in Vermont they set the stage for Gilbert and Sullivan operas, traveling minstrel shows and vaudeville acts.

Over the past few years, hundreds of hand-painted theater curtains that once hung on small stages in Vermont's opera houses and in its town and Grange halls have been found and are being revived thanks to a statewide preservation effort, the Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project.
The project began in 1998, when the Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance tried to inventory the state's theater curtains, asking all 251 of the state's town and city clerks for help.
In 2001, Chris Hadsel, who started the project while at the alliance, began to solicit state and federal money to repair the drapes. The grants, now totaling about $500,000, paid for most of the project, along with money from each city or town involved.
Most of the curtains were made and used from 1880 to 1940, when traveling acts and local productions performed in opera houses or town halls, most of which also housed a community center with a stage. The towns bought the drapes from local artists or from mass producers. But acts stopped coming, opera houses closed, local performances shifted to high schools and towns began ignoring their stages.
The painted-curtain tradition is largely a New England phenomenon, though some places in the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic have also used the drapes. Vermont is the first state to do this kind of inventory, and there are efforts to duplicate the project in New Hampshire. Read the rest of the article here