We are proud to announce that we have digitized and made public more than 700 photos from our Montclair Dramatic Club (MDC) collection! The Montclair History Center (MHC) first received the MDC collection in the late 1990s. The collection contains six boxes of material including photographs, playbills, scripts, newsletters and even a gavel. This summer, we were able to digitize all 711 photographs and add them to our Digital Collections.
MDC hosted its first play in 1889, and would continue for more than a century until the early 90s. They would present two different plays a year, one in the spring and another in the fall. They had no permanent home, performing their plays first at the Montclair Club on Church Street from 1889-1924; then at the Montclair Theater on Bloomfield Avenue from 1924-1928; George Inness Junior High School from 1928-1930; Mt. Hebron School from 1931 to the 1970s; and at the Montclair Kimberly Academy from the 70s to the 90s.
Club members and some amateur actors from the surrounding area performed in the plays, and later on, they formed a Junior Wing to engage younger members. During WWI, they performed special productions for service men. Some notable members who went to careers in the entertainment industry were Katherine Emory, Louise Houston, and Charles Mortimer, while models Patty Boyd and Margaret Duval also took part in some plays. The MDC was the longest running active amateur theater in the United States until it disbanded in the late 1990s.
You can view the entire MDC photograph collection online here: https://montclairhistory.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/MHC~12~12
Special thanks to Donnie Mason (Rutgers University, Class of Fall 2025) who conducted the scanning and uploading of the images, created the metadata, and wrote the blog post for the MDC photograph collection.
This photo taken from MDC’s performance of Mrs. Gorringe’s Necklace is from 1910, the earliest year out of all of the photos we have dates for in this collection. Note the fairly small scale of the performance, which can be contrasted with the scope of the some of the productions from later in the club’s life.
This photo of the cast from their 1961 play Aunt Mamie shows how much larger the production and set had become.
This photo depicts a scene from their performance of Diary of Anne Frank. Dating from 1987, this is the most recent play photographed in the collection.
This is a scene from their 1939 performance of Tovarich.