Palace Theater

Joe Vogel on November 28, 2011 at 1:56 am

The Georgia Historical Society site doesn’t specifically say that the Palace opened in 1910, only that Oliver Hardy remained in Milledgeville and worked at the Palace when his mother left town in 1910, and that the Palace was the town’s first movie theater. Unless there is some other source that provides firm 1910 opening date for the Palace, we have to consider the possibility that the theater might have been in operation for some time before Oliver Hardy became its manager.

In fact it seems very unlikely that Milledgeville would not have gotten its first movie house until 1910. It was a good-sized town by 1900, with over 4000 people, and had actually been Georgia’s capital city from 1804 until 1868.

If the Palace did open as late as 1910, it probably wasn’t Milledgeville’s first movie theater. The September 19, 1908, issue of The Moving Picture World had this item: “Milledgeville, Ga.—F. W. Butts has leased a store in the Elks Building and will install a moving picture show.”

Perhaps Mr. Butts' project never got off the ground, or perhaps his theater’s existence was very brief and has been forgotten by local historians. I’ve been unable to find any other information about the Elks Building except for a Wikipedia article about the Twin Lakes Library System, which says that Milledgeville’s first library opened in the vacant Elks Building in 1938, but it indicates that the building was located on Hancock Street, so Mr. Butts' 1908 project must not have been the Palace Theatre.

lostmemory on September 22, 2009 at 7:16 pm

Here is a new link to the Georgia Historical Society. In case this link expires, here is the information given there:

“On this corner stood the Milledgeville Hotel built in 1858 while Milledgeville served as Georgia’s capital. In 1903 Emily Norvell Hardy took over management of the hotel. She moved into the hotel with her two youngest children, including eleven-year-old Norvell who would later become known to the world as comedian Oliver Hardy. After his mother left Milledgeville in 1910, Oliver Hardy remained to take a job as a projectionist at the city’s first movie theater, the Palace, located across the street from the Milledgeville Hotel. It was at the Palace that Oliver Hardy resolved to become an actor in motion pictures”.