New Salem Auditorium

New Salem Auditorium is a 100 plus year old facility in New Salem, North Dakota. For more than 30 years, it served as the movie house for the town.

New Salem had a movie theatre in downtown from 1915 to the early 1920’s. That operation moved to Turner Hall as the Rex Theatre and then the Grand Theatre. Meanwhile, in 1926, the City Council gave approval of a new auditorium to the plans of architect Herman Leonhard of Mandan. City Auditorium launched on December 31, 1926 - a New Year’s Eve Dance - and had a formal opening with the state’s governor Arthur G. Sorlie on May 18, 1927.

The folks at the Grand Theatre proposed moving the the venue to the City Auditorium likely with an eye on sound issues at Turner Hall. The City granted the arrangement beginning on May 26, 1928 as the Grand Theatre. Towns with fewer than 1,000 residents such as New Salem found it challenging to convert to sound films. Two local residents found funding, changed the interior wall treatment and ceiling treatment and equipped the City Auditorium for sound. The first sound film was October 3, 1931 with William Boyd in “The Painted Desert”. It is suggested here that the Grand Theatre then found a new home only based on newspaper reportage.

The Auditorium Theatre likely concluded not long after the building’s 30th Anniversary. In the 1960’s, the venue was updated for non-theatrical uses and has remained a part of the community for another 60 more years. And at its 100th Anniversary, virtually everyone who looked at the building’s opening-day shots and current-day shots admired its virtually unchanged exterior look.

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