The James Adams Floating Theatre was a floating theater founded in 1914 by James Adams and his wife Gertrude, that toured Chesapeake Bay staging theater in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.
It was visited in 1925 by Edna Ferber, who boarded the vessel in Bath, North Carolina, while writing the 1926 novel which inspired Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway show Show Boat.
In early decades of the 20th century, the showboat, a huge, scow-like wooden craft plying the Chesapeake Bay, called at waterfront towns from the top of the Chesapeake down to the coast of North Carolina.
[2] The arrival of the Adams Floating Theater was an exciting time for residents in these isolated communities as the performances got underway.
Then as summer gave way to fall, the floating theater drifted south toward Elizabeth City, NC, where it normally spent the winter[3] Over 200 different plays were performed in the years the James Adams Floating Theater was active (1914-1941).