Farmyard Drive-In
1922 Rawlins Road,
Atchison,
KS
66002
1922 Rawlins Road,
Atchison,
KS
66002
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In 1960, at his farm within the Mt Pleasant township two miles north of the unincorporated community of Potter, Andrew Ernzen painted the side of a barn white to show movies. He advertised it as the Farmyard Drive-In in the May 26, 1960 Atchison Daily Globe. (His sons later remembered, in a lengthy story in the November 18, 1990 Globe, that the first film, shown earlier that year, was “Come Next Spring” with Walter Brennan.)
In 1965, he built a 24x48-foot plywood screen. Sons Jerome and Ambrose ran two Brenkert projectors, purchased from the owners of Atchison’s Orpheum Theater, in a small metal building on Friday and Saturday nights after working in the field. Ernzen operated the Farmyard Drive-In until he suffered a stroke in May 1979. The tattered remains of the screen were still standing in 1990.
The 1976 Motion Picture Almanac included the Farmyard Drive-In, capacity 100 cars, under Atchison.
A 1982 aerial photo showed the remains of a small drive-in just east of the farm at the intersection of Rawlins Road and Potter Road. Since then the site has become overgrown.
Contributed by
Michael Kilgore
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Recent comments (view all 1 comments)
A closer address is 1922 Rawlins Rd, Atchison, KS.
Google Maps has updated their addresses and this puts it right next to the drive-in. The drive-in sat on the SE side of the property.
It was still intact (sorta) in 1991, but was demolished by 2006. Today, the area is overgrown with only the general outline still being recognizable as a drive-in.
https://tinyurl.com/5n97m7kz