State Theatre
275 W. St. Louis Street,
Nashville,
IL
62263
275 W. St. Louis Street,
Nashville,
IL
62263
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Additional Info
Previous Names: Gem Theatre
Nearby Theaters
No theaters found within 30 miles
This theater appears on the 1915 Sanborn, operating in an old one-story building used as recently as 1906 as a dry goods/grocer. This may have been the same building as one appearing as early as the 1886 map. If so, it originally had a second floor containing a music hall. This disappears by the 1899 map, but the footprint of the building remains the same.
According to local history, the theater was opened in the 1900’s as the Gem Theatre. The owner may have been a Professor Wagner, who was certainly running it in 1931, when it was sold. The name was changed to the State Theatre in 1933.
When the new State Theatre on W. Elm Street was built in 1948, this building was sold and demolished, to be replaced by the current structure.
Contributed by
Seth Gaines
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Recent comments (view all 1 comments)
The earliest mention of a movie theater at Nashville I’ve found in the trade publications is in the September 7, 1918 issue of Moving Picture World, but that house was called the Picture.
The April 13, 1929 issue of Universal Weekly published a letter from W. Wagner of Nashville, Illinois, in which he said that he had been in show business for fourteen years. His theater’s name was not mentioned, but the only theater at Nashville was listed in the FDY as the Gem by 1926. The April 1, 1933 issue of Motion Picture Herald ran a letter from H. R. Hisey of the State Theatre in Nashville.