Mystery: What happened to this Mount Vernon star comedienne?

MOUNT VERNON — Long before Knox County presented actor Luke Perry to the world, even before Paul Lynde, there was another one destined for national fame. But fame is fickle, and the star that was once a household name is now almost completely forgotten: Lizzie Evans.

I have heard through the grapevine that historian Dr. Lorle Porter is working on a book about Evans. It will be exciting to see what Dr. Porter is able to dig up, because fleeting mentions are commonplace in newspapers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. But solid information is scarce.

What is known is that she was regularly identified as being from Mount Vernon, Ohio. Yet records of her time here are elusive. Some modern sources claim she was born around 1864 or 1865, yet one newspaper report from 1879 already identifies her as touring with the Standard Dramatic Company in a lead role.

Is it, perhaps, more likely that she shaved a few years off her age, as many actors have done?

What is definite is that Lizzie Evans rocketed into the national consciousness in the early 1880s. She had graduated in Cincinnati (which suggests she might be a daughter of the Welsh-born widow Sarah Evans who lived in Cincinnati in 1880), and made her local stage debut.

The play she performed in, “A Messenger from Jarvis Station,” was widely panned, though her performance was praised. One critic from a showing across the river in Kentucky was rather taken with the young woman: “She can show more linen and be freer from vulgarity than any actress we’ve ever seen.”

Evans quickly became known for her unstoppable energy, which earned her the nickname “The Little Electric Battery.” And little she was, reviews often mentioning her petite size. One even went so far as to call her “flat-chested” and “intelligent looking rather than beautiful.” But that speaks to the era.

In the immediate post Civil War era, audiences wanted beautiful people and exotic scenes to take them far away from their sad memories of the war. Evans was part of a new wave of what were called “personality girls,” who put their emphasis on expression over bland prettiness.

In 1883, Evans teamed with a most unlikely manager. Charles E. Callahan had been Cincinnati’s prosecuting attorney in the mid-1870s, and may even be the same Charles E. Callahan listed as playing briefly for the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1866, which would be when Callahan returned to the area after serving in the Civil War.

But by the 1880s, he had a new horizon in his sites. He had started writing plays.

Callahan wrote a play called “Fogg’s Ferry,” and seeing the popularity of the young Lizzie Evans, he cast her in the role of Chip, the ferryman’s daughter. From all accounts, she stole the show with moments of comic relief from the melodramatic music theater plot. The play was a hit and it toured extensively all over the United States. And it should be noted that a touring show wasn’t like today, just hitting a couple theaters per state.

A tour in the 1880s would have hit every small town that had a theater for at least a hundred people. Almost every town in those days had an opera house, and this tour probably hit every one of them.

Evans continued to work for Callahan for about a decade, but she must have felt some frustration with the quality of her plays. For though Callahan wrote or produced all of them, Evans was always given leading roles and the works were described by the newspapers as “her newest play.”

Late in the 1880s, Callahan wrote a new and improved version of Fogg’s Ferry, but it wasn’t enough to hold Lizzie Evans.

She apparently wanted out.

It may not be a coincidence that this all developed shortly after she married comedian Harry Mills.

According to a press announcement of the Atlanta nuptials in November of 1890, “Miss Evans was formerly Mrs. Nelson Compton.” Compton was another actor active on the touring scene. Evans appears to have gone into a temporary retirement in the 1890s, but by the end of the decade, she had returned to the stage, often performing with Harry Mills in vaudeville theater.

On one hand, she may have missed performing, but wanted to do vaudeville instead of music theater. And on the other hand, vaudeville paid much better than music theater.

Evans also toured some non-musical theatrical pieces during this period. When she stopped to perform in Mansfield in 1903 with the play “At Cozy Corners,” tickets ranged from a quarter to a whole dollar.

These shows cemented her reputation. A.D. Storms’ “The Players Blue Book” in 1901 had already praised her by saying, “Miss Evans had achieved, by her genuine art, vivacity and versatility, a prominent place among the notable comediennes of the day.”

I wasn’t able to find any mentions of her husband Harry Mills performing past 1920, when he was described as an “old-timer” in a bit part in a cast. Lizzie Evans herself continued to headline into the 1920s.

The last mention I turned up of Evans was a review of her performance of the lead role Miss Cornelia Van Gorder in the mystery “The Bat,” in Knoxville, Tennessee, on October 29, 1923. By the time a silent film version of the play was filmed in 1926, a different actress appeared in the lead.

Whether Evans had passed by then or had simply declined to get involved with movies, I don’t know. Both she and her husband may have lived under different names than what they used on stage, for they prove remarkably elusive on census reports throughout this period.

I look forward to seeing what details Dr. Porter can find to elucidate the mysteries of Lizzie Evans.