Grand Theatre

wsasser on January 22, 2017 at 3:29 pm

From an application for the National Registry for Tangier Island

The J. E. Wallace & Co. Store was established by John Wallace (1855-1926) who came to Tangier in the 1870s. The largest store on the island, according to an old photo, it was a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century, frame, hippedroofedbuilding with a long front porch.

It sold groceries, general merchandise, and coffins as Wallace was also an undertaker and had a “coffin house” as an adjacent building on the property.

After his father’s retirement in 1921, Sidney S. Wallace opened the Wallacedale Theatre, the island’s first movie house, after constructing a stage, seats, and booths and installing a projector at the western end of the store.

The Wallacedale closed shortly after Wallace’s death in 1936 and it was torn down in the 1940s.

Another theatre known as The Grand located across from the
Methodist Church continued to show movies until around 1960; it was demolished shortly thereafter.