Virginia Theatre

Peanutbred on August 26, 2016 at 11:18 pm

This primarily vaudeville venue was built in 1915 and was located at what is now known as 256 West Washington Street, which is currently a vacant lot. It was slow to embrace motion pictures as a form of entertainment, although it was said to have shown the silent epic, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. That, however, has never been authenticated.

By 1920, an actual movie house, Nansemond Fotosho, on North Main Street, had pretty much put vaudeville out to pasture in Suffolk, and the Virginia Theatre was shuttered, torn down, and replaced with an automobile dealership, Nansemond Motor Corporation. The building on the left side of the theater still stands, although it would be difficult to recognize after it was “modernized” in 1962.