City of the Arts” may be a relatively recent moniker for Lawrence, but it wouldn’t have been a misnomer 150 years ago.

The very people who founded Lawrence in 1854 carried their musical instruments along with their essentials on the cross-country trek to begin the city by the Kaw.

Five of those musicians formed the first Lawrence city band — the direct ancestor of the ensemble that brasses up South Park on summer evenings to this day.

The band might be the earliest documented evidence of the arts in Lawrence. It played for the community on a summer evening in 1863 — the same calm evening that gave way to a blood-drenched dawn when Quantrill’s ruffians scourged the city the next morning.

But not even burning much of the city to the ground stopped the creative spirit from swelling here. In the 150 years since its founding, Lawrence has become home to a handful of mainstay series and organizations that have supported the arts in all their forms for decades. Through the years, an entrancing mix of home-grown talent and renowned national acts have graced the city’s stages.

Lawrence City Band

The musicians who formed the first band performed at weddings, funerals and other gathering in territorial Lawrence. Members played for the Kansas Conference of the Methodist Church, and Kansas’s first governor, Charles Robinson, was so impressed that he started a campaign to raise money for new instruments.

The band tried out its new brass for the first time on Aug. 20, 1863, what turned out to be the eve of Quantrill’s Raid, “with everyone down by the (Kansas River) bridge having a fine time listening to music.” Three musicians were killed in the next day’s attack. A horn damaged during the raid is on display at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka.

The band continued in various forms under different names, playing at the first Kansas University graduation in 1867 and for New York Gov. Theodore Roosevelt when he was a vice-presidential candidate in 1900.

William Kelly, who directed the band for several decades, began the tradition of starting and ending each concert with a march. Former KU band director Robert Foster took over the city band in 1992. Many Lawrence residents still mark the official beginning of summer with the first Lawrence City Band concert in South Park.

Appropriately, the band played this year’s Lied Center free outdoor concert on Aug. 20 — 141 years to the day their musician predecessors first entertained Lawrencians by the Kansas River. This time, fortunately, no attacks followed at dawn.

The Concert Series

What began as Kansas University Dean Charles Skilton’s idea for a spring music festival spun into an annual Concert Series that has continued to bring world-class performers to Lawrence for a century.

He dreamed up the event in 1903, and the inaugural May Music Festival in 1904 featured the Haskell Indian Band, University Glee Club, University Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

By 1915, the series had been renamed the Concert Course, and it continued under various leadership, including that of School of Fine Arts Dean Donald Swarthout, who started the Swarthout Chamber Music Series in 1947.

From 1927 until 1991, the year Hoch Auditorium burned after a lightning strike, many of the Concert Series’ performances took place in that venerable building, which “had its charm in the sort of way that a building with so much historical significance does, but it did not lend itself to presenting the arts at their best,” says Karen Christilles, associate director of the Lied Center.

Performances rotated among Hoch, Crafton-Preyer Theatre in Murphy Hall and other venues until the Lied Center opened in the fall of 1993.

The series has expanded so that it now includes the New Directions Series, the Broadway & Beyond Series, the Lied Family Series and the World Series.

Countless top-notch acts have performed in the Concert Series since its inception. Highlights include: cellists Pablo Casals and Yo-Yo Ma; pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff; trumpet player Wynton Marsalis; contralto Marian Anderson; soprano Leontyne Price; the Trapp Family Singers; ballad singer Burl Ives; violinists Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman; and The Martha Graham Dance Company, the Joffrey Ballet and Twyla Tharp Dance.

“The work that was brought in was just absolutely phenomenal,” says Christilles, who saw Isaac Stern and Philip Glass perform at KU when she was a graduate student.

Spencer Museum of Art

Though the Spencer Museum of Art just celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, the collection that started it all has been part of the KU fabric since 1928.

That’s when Kansas City art collector Sallie Casey Thayer’s donation of some 5,000 pieces was officially dedicated. It formed the core of KU’s art collection. Before the current museum was built in 1978, precious paintings, sculptures and other artworks were crammed into Spooner Hall, stored in the basement of Strong Hall and hung in faculty offices across campus.

Kansas Citian Helen Foresman Spencer’s $4.5 million donation in 1975 made possible the neo-classical limestone building that houses the art museum, KU’s art history department and an art library.

Today the museum has more than 25,000 catalogued items and 22,473 square feet of exhibition space. It continues to attract national-caliber exhibitions and visiting artists.

Lawrence Community Theatre

The Lawrence Community Theatre is a local fixture now, but in 1976 it was just a dream of artistic director Mary Doveton and a few friends. They put together a kitty of $500 and decided to see what they could do with it, Doveton says.

They made enough off of their first show to stage another, and their success snowballed. But they were a troupe without a home, jumping from the Lawrence Arts Center to South Park to Trinity Episcopal Church and Teepee Junction.

The theater moved to its current location, an old church at 1501 N.H., in 1984. Its first show in the building was an original script by local playwright John Clifford called “I Was Right Here a Moment Ago.”

The theater now produces six to eight major shows each year, from much-loved musicals to comedies and dramas, and is in the early stages of planning for a larger home in west Lawrence.

Lawrence Arts Center

The Lawrence Arts Center bloomed in a building with a history of educating common people and immersing them in a fantasy world through books. After opening in 1975 in the old Carnegie Library at Ninth and Vermont streets, the arts center continued those functions — this time using art as a vehicle.

Nine classes were offered the first year, and in ensuing years, the Seem-To-Be Players, Summer Youth Theatre and the Prairie Wind Dancers moved into the space.

During its 29-year stint, the center has promoted local and regional artists in its gallery space, nurtured artists young and old in its classrooms and groomed performers in its dance and theater courses and productions.

The center moved into a state-of-the-art new facility at 940 N.H. in 2002.

Incidentally, that’s the same year the results of the Americans for the Arts national economic impact study were released, finding that Lawrence’s nonprofit arts organizations generate more than $33 million in annual spending.

Other outlets

The KU Symphony Orchestra will mark its 100th anniversary with a gala concert Oct. 12. Kansas University Theatre celebrated its 80th season last year, and the Lawrence Chamber Orchestra has been serenading the city’s residents for more than 30 years. This marks the 17th year of Lawrence’s Downtown Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, and hundreds of artists choose to live and work in the city.

Clearly Lawrence continues to breed the same creative spirit that inspired brave musicians to carry their instruments with them to settle the city on the prairie that has become the City of the Arts.