Contract for a Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels performance

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

A contract for Haverly's "Genuine Colored" Mastodon Minstrels to perform at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. The contract is a long folio leaf, with pre-printed fields that have been filled out by hand. An edit, by hand in ink, adds: "Genuine Colored" at the top of the document, which was signed by the troupe's manager, Charles Frohman. This contract stipulates that the minstrels were to get a share of the house take, based on the receipts at the door, a common practice even today. Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels was a black-face minstrel troupe created in 1877. The back of the contract has an inscription that gives a name and a date.

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