J. H. Haverly

Jack H. Haverly (1837-1901) or J. H. Haverly was an entrepreneur and promoter of blackface minstrel shows. During the 1870s and 1880s, he created an entertainment empire centered on his minstrel troupes, particularly Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels and Haverly's Colored Minstrels. Under his guidance, these troupes grew to impressive sizes and featured elaborate sets and costumes. They toured widely, enlarging minstrelsy's audience to encompass the entire United States as well as England. Haverly's methods sparked a revolution in minstrelsy as other troupes scrambled to compete. As the costs of minstrelsy increased, many troupes went out of business.

Haverly was one of a new wave of theater troupe owners and managers who had not entered the profession as a performer himself. He borrowed the spectacular techniques of famous showmen like P. T. Barnum to promote his theater companies. In the late 1870s, he turned his eye to the lifeless minstrel show, observing that other entertainments, such as stage plays, operas, and variety shows, had "increased and enlarged their dimensions until their proportions and attractive qualities [had] appeared unlimited." Minstrelsy, on the other hand, had remained much as it had been in the days of the Virginia Minstrels and Ethiopian Serenaders.

His answer would be a company of minstrels "that for extraordinary excellence, merit, and magnitude [would] astonish and satisfy the most exacting amusement seeker in the world." He gathered up a large pool of talented performers and combined them into a single troupe. Aiming his advertisements at the family market and emphasizing his shows' freedom from base humor, they toured the whole United States, not just the Northeastern circuit to which minstrelsy had previously been mostly limited.

Haverly's success in minstrelsy allowed him to finance other ventures. At the height of his fortune, he owned and managed three minstrel troupes and four comic theater groups, in addition to three theaters in New York and one in each of Brooklyn, Chicago, and San Francisco, three mining and milling companies, as well as stock in many others. Haverly's stock investments did not perform as he had wished, and by the end of 1877, he was in debt by as much as $104,000. However, he tried to skirt bankruptcy with another gamble.

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