Bay City Players, located in Bay City, Michigan, is a nonprofit community of performers and other volunteers that offers exciting, intimate and relevant theatre experiences. We believe in the power and immediacy of a great performance. Our dedication to that principle is how we’ve become Michigan’s longest continuously operating community theatre, we have been operating for 108 years. Great theatre lives here.
Emily Fox Grinnell
Bay City Players was founded by Mrs. J. D. Grinnell
That credit has appeared countless times. But who was Mrs. J.D. Grinnell?
As with many women of her era, one of the few ways to find out more about Emily Fox Grinnell is by researching her family. The story of her parents, sisters, and children helps us imagine the person she must have been.
Emily Fox was born May 18, 1859, in New York City. Her parents were Charles Sheldon Fox (1830-1904) and Catherine B. Murray Fox (1827-1897). She had two younger sisters: Florence Cornelia Fox (1862-1933) and Alma Florence Fox Holt (1864-1927).
Charles Fox, Emily’s father, has a wonderful nineteenth-century American life. Born in Kingsville, Ohio, he left home at age 11 to make his own way. He attended Kingsville Academy and became a teacher, working in Cayuga Lake and Auburn, New York. At age 26 he changed careers, becoming a Methodist minister.
He and Catherine Murray were married in 1856, and in 1859 they moved to southwest Michigan when Fox was transferred to the Michigan District of the Methodist Church. He was a popular and much-beloved minister, known throughout the state for his work.
An obituary by J.L Buell describes him:
[a]n industrious and versatile student, he explored widely extended fields of art, science, philosophy, history, and theology and metaphysics . . . as well as in other ranges of literature.
Florence Fox, from the Normal School yearbook The Echo, 1903
Highly cultured . . . daughters.
Emily and her sisters seem to have grown up in a home that valued education.
Florence attended Olivet College, graduated from Cook County Normal School, and was a teacher. From 1896-1904 she was the Teacher and Critic in the Primary Department of the Model School at Wisconsin State Normal School (later the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). She also wrote textbooks about teaching the primary grades, the Fox Series of Readers, and other storybooks such as Lily of Willowreed: The Story of a Friendly Cow.
Emily Fox married Joseph Durand Grinnell (1852-1938). They lived in Bay City from 1888, most of those years in a house on Ninth Street that was built in 1890. Mr. Grinnell was a commercial traveler for the Chicago Rubber Clothing Company of Racine, WI
The company made rubber raincoats for men, women, and children, and also made inner tubes and retreads for automobile tires. Emily Grinnell joined the Musical-Art Club in 1911, when the Bay City Art Club and the Thursday Morning Musical Club joined forces. These are examples of the thousands of groups around the country, mostly consisting of women, which studied and fostered fine arts, performing arts, and literature. When Emily Grinnell suggested that the club actually stage rather than just read two one-act plays, that began our hundred year-run.
Directed by Mrs. J. D. Grinnell was the credit line on more than fifty shows over the next twenty years. Her last show was just a year before her death.
Joseph Durand Grinnell
Our Home
After 38 homeless years, playing in members homes , schools and churches, Bay City Players purchased the Pines Movie Theater in 1955 and has performed here ever since.
Between 1955 – 1994 – Renovations included expanding the stage, installing make-shift temporary make up and dressings rooms; raking floor of the last five rows, remodeling the lobby, adding the orchestra pit, and adding new seats in 1975. The years were also filled with dozens of smaller projects, for example lighting and sound improvements and even a backstage toilet.
Our present day theater renovations began in 1994. for a cost of $342,000 Two houses behind the theatre were leveled and an addition attached to the back of the theatre providing permanent make-up & dressing rooms, restrooms, costume storage & construction, scenery construction, storage & parking. The stage was expanded to absorb the space previously occupied by the make up room and the dressing rooms.
Phase 2 –began in 1998 at a cost of $750,000 Stan’s Auto Shop was purchased and leveled. The front of the theatre from auditorium to street was removed. An L-shaped addition was added to the remaining building, adding a larger lobby, larger restrooms, a kitchen, box office, business office , coat room, rehearsal space, prop storage, custodial room, back stage storage area, & additional parking. All with handicap accessibility.
Phase 3 was to be completed by 2017. The final stage of preparing Bay City Players’ theatre for the next 100 years to come, included new seating and configuration, raking the entire auditorium floor, acoustical reconstruction of the walls and ceiling, stage extension to encompass the orchestra pit, stage, auditorium, and orchestra pit handicap accessibility, up-dating the lobby, and the creation of three additional stalls in the women’s restroom. Actual construction was completed by 2015 at a cost of $700,000
Our newest parking area to the west added 27 parking places and was completed in 2019.
A New roof was completed in 2021.
MISSION STATEMENT: Bay City Players is a volunteer-based community theatre dedicated to providing high-quality theatrical experiences for the entertainment, education, and enrichment of the community.
If you are interested in more of what Bay City has to offer contact our partners below. They will have information on the arts, events, and entertainment that is happening here.
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