American Theatre

The American Theatre was a silent-era move house that had morphed from the Opera House - Martinsville and briefly became the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Martinsville. Housing the entertainment venue was the Odd Fellows Lodge #134, a three-story structure with the Opera House on its top floor. On the afternoon of June 11, 1912, the neighboring building caught on fire and in extinguishing the fire, the town’s wells dried up and five buildings - a third of downtown - was gone.

But given the fatal fires at multilevel opera houses and theaters, the town was lucky in that there was no event happening in the upper level opera house and, thus, no deaths in that fire. Oddly, when the hall was rebuilt, the opera house stayed aloft as an upper level house - not a good practice for a 390-seat hall playing, combustible silent nitrate films.

The risk payed out with the venue turning under W.H. Rector from the Opera House to the American Theatre before closing unable to transition to sound films at the onset of the Depression closing in early-1930.

New operators Dwight Mills and Ralph Myers took on the venue as the Lincoln Theatre with the film, “Songs of Love” - not the sound film but the silent. They changed the venue’s name to the Lincoln Theatre. The venue closed again in 1931. Rector came back pledging to installing sound at its May 12, 1931 reopening back as the American Theatre. He does not appear to have installed that sound system. The venue closed before month’s end with Rector gone a second time.

In 1936, Sinclair Industries gave the building a major refresh which - if reports are accurate - ended the opera house. As conditions improved in town economically, new operators wanted to establish a theatre in 1939. Nat and Grace Fitzjerrald - finding the opera house out of play - went to the next building they could find. They opened the Mars Theatre in the Wood Block next door and it has its own entry on Cinema Treasures.

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