Star Theater
100 S. Van Buren Street,
Newton,
IL
62448
100 S. Van Buren Street,
Newton,
IL
62448
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The Star Theater dates back to a least 1914. It operated into the 1950’s. The building is now home to the Newton Museum.
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Lost Memory
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Here is a 2/24/54 item in the Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette:
NEWTON, Ill.-T.J. Price, manager of Newton’s Star Theater, announced Tuesday that the movie house has been sold to Frank Rogers of Paris. Rogers has been an employee in Paris theaters for the past ten years. The management changeover will become effective Sunday.
A Star Theatre is listed as one of four movie houses at Newton in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, but it is given the address of 7 E. Washington Street. This might have been an error, though, as a house called the Idle Hour was given the same address.
However that may be, the facade of the Star Theatre building is designed in the prairie style, which was quite popular in the region during the 1910s, so I suspect that the building was erected as a theater during that decade. The Star Theatre was mentioned in the August 7, 1918 issue of The Moving Picture World, and appears fairly often in various trade publications thereafter.
A History of the Jasper County Museum says that the library moved into the Star Theatre building in 1958, though it appears that it was not located in the theater section. In 1965 the theater portion of the building was converted into the museum. The article does not say when the theater stopped operating.
While it is nice that the building itself survives, at some point whoever runs the and museum chose to paint over that splendid tapestry brick facade, which in our post-museum conversion photo appears still to have been in excellent condition. It’s an inexplicable act of aesthetic vandalism, which I hope can be reversed someday.