Theatre
118 E. Main Street,
Elk Point,
SD
57025
118 E. Main Street,
Elk Point,
SD
57025
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This theatre first appears on the 1917 Sanborn, in a simple concrete block building that replaced a few little wooden stores on the 1912 map. It was likely built to be a theatre.
It’s unknown when it closed, but the building has been retail for many years. It was a hardware store for a long time, but is now a hair salon. The building is in decent shape with a modified storefront.
Contributed by
Seth Gaines
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Recent comments (view all 6 comments)
The only two theaters listed in a 1916 Elk Point business directory are the Opera House and the Florence. I’d be inclined to think this was the Florence, if not for the fact that the FDY listings for that house, which begin in 1926, give it a capacity of 350, and this building seems too small to accommodate that many seats. Still, Florence is the only theater name other than Opera House I’ve been able to confirm in Elk Point during this era. Maybe the FDY simply got the capacity wrong, or perhaps the Florence moved to a larger building between 1917 and 1926.
This may have been the Florence, or at least the first one. An opening around 1915 makes sense. Going by old postcards, this seems to have been a bank (or something with a clock sign) by about 1940.
Is it possible the Florence moved to the old opera house? That would make sense of the floor collapse in 1930. I suppose this building might have had some sort of basement into which a floor could collapse, but you’re right that the capacity seems impossible here.
It’s possible the Florence ended up in the Opera House building, which sources I’ve seen indicate dated to 1891 or earlier. A 1915 building inspection listed the Opera House as being in poor condition, while the Florence was listed as very good, which might be expected if the building was nearly new.
Although you can see that the side wall had cracked by 1917.
A February 1, 1930 item in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported the destruction by fire of Fred Nearman’s cream station in Elk Point. The Florence Theatre was one of the neighboring buildings which suffered some smoke and water damage. Wilmarth’s barber shop was on the other side of the burned building. The cream station was a frame structure.
This weblog post presents some memories of Don Fowler, who grew up in Elk Point in the 1910s and 1920s, and he mentions the Opera House, and says that Wilmarth’s barber shop was on one side of it and a bank on the other. On the 1917 Sanborn, there are banks on both sides of the Opera House, but next to one bank is a small wood frame building housing a barber shop and lunch room, and next to that is this moving picture house at 118 E. Main.
What I suspect is that one of the banks closed and Wilmarth’s barber shop moved into its space, and the barber shop and lunch room became the site of Nearman’s cream station, in between the new barber shop location and the Florence Theatre. The improbably large seating capacity listed for the Florence in the FDYs of the 1920s was probably a mistake. The last appearance of the Florence in the 1935 FDY gives it only 220 seats, a plausible number that was probably true all along.
It’s unfortunate that Don Fowler mentions Elk Point’s movie house only in passing, not even giving its name, only saying that it showed silent movies. The ambitious Mr. Fowler, who in 1930 became the first of his family to enroll in college, probably didn’t squander his youth watching picture shows.