Jefferson Theatre
703 E. Main Street,
Jefferson City,
TN
37760
703 E. Main Street,
Jefferson City,
TN
37760
1 person
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Originally a silent movie theatre, the Jefferson Theatre was opened as a ‘talkie’ theatre on November 2, 1933 with Buster Crabbe in “King of the Jungle”. A 1945 photograph shows the Jefferson Theatre in a 2-story store front with a small triangle marquee. The Jefferson Theatre was closed on August 4, 1949. (not to be confused with the later Jefferson Theatre (former Melody Theatre) which has its own page on Cinema Treasures).
Contributed by
William Dunklin
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Recent comments (view all 4 comments)
Address is 703. The building is still there. Everything else in the photo except the nearest building is long gone. It’s in pretty shabby condition, and looked like it was home to a dance studio.
By the way, the cars in the photo are all wrong for 1932. Movie appears to be ‘The Strange Mr. Gregory’ from 1945. What looks like a date at bottom right must be a stock number.
The only Sanborn map I can find any evidence of is from 1929, and is not available online. The building looks like it was constructed sometime around 1920. It was probably not meant to be a theater, since it’s very deep and narrow. Sometime maybe around 1960, the ground floor was remodeled with a rock veneer and plate glass windows.
The Jefferson Theatre reopened on November 2, 1933 with RCA sound and “King of the Jungle” on the big screen. (It had apparently had a brief run as a silent theater and was unable to immediately convert to talkies.) It closed in that location on August 4, 1949. The next day the new Melody Theatre opened in downtown.
The Jefferson nameplate would return in 1957 when the Melody Theatre’s name was changed to the Jefferson Theatre. This caused confusion not only for Cinema Treasures but for locals who referred to the theaters as the “old Jefferson” when it went out of business and the original facility as the “old old Jefferson.” The reason was that the “old old” Jefferson was the only equipped former theater left in town and was used for very sporadic live events.