Liberty Theatre
923 Central Avenue,
Horton,
KS
66439
923 Central Avenue,
Horton,
KS
66439
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Horton is located in northeast Kansas. The Liberty Theatre was already operating in 1927. Listed in the 1950 Film Daily Yearbook with 680 seats. The Liberty Theatre is still listed in the 1955 Horton telephone directory. It was closed in the early-1980’s.
It was demolished in late-1990 or early-1991.
Contributed by
Ridgewood Ken
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Recent comments (view all 7 comments)
It appears that this theater has been demolished.
The Liberty Theatre was to the right of the building with the cedar shingles. It was razed in the late 1980’s. It started as a Vaudeville theatre. Silent pics were showed there, then on to talkies. I was a projectionist there when I was in high school – my dad ran the booth. It was still running movies when I left in 1984.
Atchison Globe, Nov. 18, 1990: “The Liberty Theatre in Horton ran its last show in the early 1980s according to Forrest Keener, one of a group of citizens who purchased the theater from Eddie Landau in the 1960s to try to keep it going. The building is now condemned and has barricade blocking the entrance. LeRoy Paden, mayor of Horton, said the city plans to tear it down.”
Looks like it opened in 1927. The old Colonial is the only theater listed in 1926. It’s definitely not on the 1924 map.
Demolition date is wrong. As the article MK found says, it was late 1990 or perhaps sometime early 1991.
Those cruddy shingles have been removed from the building that had them, but the theater was at the vacant lot between the little office and the nice old auto service building with the wood and glass doors.
An ad for the American Seating Company in the August 20, 1927 issue of Movie Age listed a “Horton, Horton, Kansas” among a few dozen theaters that had installed the company’s seats, but I think this might have been the Liberty. A blurb praising the movie “Passion Play” from “Liberty, Horton, Kas.” was published in the November 12 issue of the same journal that year. As the Colonial is not listed in the 1927 FDY, the year the Liberty first appears, it is likely that the former was closed and the latter opened before the 1927 edition was compiled, so a late 1926 opening for the Liberty is possible.