Vermont Theatre

The town of Vermont, Illinois had three different theatres on Main Street. So this entry will handle all three. The first was the Vaudeville Theater which booked live acts before adding film to the mix. The 500-seat hall had been the Vermont Opera House beginning in the late-19th Century and likely found that vaudeville plus films was a little less risky to book.

The Princess Theatre opened by W.C. Geer and was exclusively used for motion pictures. The theatre had just 175 seats and was also in a location in North Main Street - likely a converted retail building. Despite its diminutive size, it’s one of the most documented small-town theatres in the nation in the mid-1920s thanks to Geer’s reportage of each film from a period roughly from 1924 to 1927. It appears that Geer was unable to convert the venue to sound and the Princess Theatre closed.

The town got one last hope for film exhibition viability when the old Vermont Opera House was reopened as the Vermont Theatre. It was part of a Dale Kennedy Circuit of 21 small town movie houses that switched to lower cost 16mm films in 1940. Theatres in nearby Table Grove (just about five miles away), Astoria (8 miles away), and Blandinsville appear to be in that circuit. The 362 seat count auditorium was certainly enough to handle the traffic of Vermont, Table Grove and Ipava.

The 16mm operation appears to have failed fairly quickly and the theatre appears to have been equipped with or switched back to 35mm projection. And it out survived the Table Grove Theatre (ceasing operations in 1947). Like many small-town theatres, the Vermont Theatre scuffled in the TV age. Local businesses banded together to reopen the venue under the operation of K.C. Kessler in May of 1954. Shoppers could obtain free movie passes to attend films. But that failed and the theatre closed permanently in January of 1955.

Like many theatres of the period, it was converted to a bowling alley - much like the Amus-U Theatre in La Harpe, Illinois. The long running Vermont Bowl lanes were still in operation in the 2020’s.

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