Family Theater

This house was undoubtedly on E. Main Street, as the Frankfort Heights area is that direction from downtown West Frankfort. Frankfort Heights was the original town of Frankfort, founded in the 1810s. In the late 19th century a new north-south railroad line bypassed the town to its west and local businesses began moving to a new townsite adjacent to the tracks, and that became the nucleus of West Frankfort.

An April 4, 1925 article in Exhibitors Herald noted that two small theaters in Frankfort Heights had escaped serious damage from a storm that had recently destroyed movie houses in several towns in the region. It didn’t give the names of the theaters, but one must have been the Family and the other a theater called the New Grand, which the February 23, 1924 issue of The Reel Journal had said was slated to open on March 1. The New Grand might have been a renovation of a house called the American Theatre, which the February 3 Reel Journal had said had been temporarily closed.

So the 1928 theater might have been in the the building built for the New Grand in 1924. Though only the Family was listed in the 1926 FDY, both the Family and Grand Theatres were listed in the 1927, 1928 and 1929 editions, and the whole town vanished from the 1930 edition. Trade journal reports indicate that the Grand changed hands at least twice within a few months of opening, so it must have been struggling. The 1926 FDY lists houses called the Family Theatre in both West Frankfort and Frankfort Heights, but doesn’t list the New Grand.

A bit more confusion arises from a report in the July, 1915 issue of Safety Engineering that a fire had damaged the Grand Theatre in West Frankfort on May 15. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists only a house called the Arc Theatre at West Frankfort and none at Frankfort Heights. The book did miss a lot of theaters though, so it doesn’t mean the Family wasn’t in operation then, or that the Arc didn’t have local competition.