Theatre
Railroad Avenue,
Northfork,
WV
24868
Railroad Avenue,
Northfork,
WV
24868
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Sometime between 1910 and 1916, the North Fork Hotel replaced its wooden building with a fine three story brick structure. Faced in light colored brick, the hotel occupied the upper floors above five storefronts. The second space from the east was a theatre.
This was a deep and narrow space, and the entry was typical of the era, with an arched opening at the front, holding a central ticket booth. The theatre remained in operation on the 1923 map. Later maps are not available online, and almost all the photos of this section of town show the buildings on the other side of the ‘street’.
Railroad Avenue then was actually sidewalks either side of three sets of tracks for the Norfolk & Western, which served a large station next to the hotel, and the area coal fields. The north side of the ‘street’ was once over two blocks of two to four story businesses. Nothing at all survives today. The hotel was roughly where the map shows the city hall. It uses a Friebursch Avenue address, but that street, and the now closed bridge, did not exist then.
Although the town itself was never more than about 1,500 people, McDowell County had nearly 100,000 people in 1950. This supported a downtown out of proportion to the actual population of Northfork, as it was a commercial center for people from dozens of nearby coal camps. With increased mechanization of coal mining after World War II (and mine closures beginning in the 1960’s), the county entered a precipitous decline. Unemployment was rampant, and the population plummeted as entire towns were nearly abandoned. The county today is one of the poorest in the nation, home to under 18,000 people. Northfork reflects that, and almost all of downtown has been demolished.
Contributed by
Seth Gaines
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This house might have been called either the Grand, the Lyric, or the Palace. In June, 1922, several issues of Moving Picture World ran capsule movie reviews submitted by R. Mason Hall of the Grand Theatre, Northfork, West Virginia. Another such review, from the issue of May 12, 1923, gives the seating capacity of the Grand as 300. The Grand is listed in the 1926 FDY, along with houses called the Lyric and the Palace. It was the last listing for the Grand. The Palace was last listed in 1928, and the Lyric in 1929, when the new Freeman Theatre first appeared.
The 1922 references to the Grand are the only mentions of any early Northfork houses I’ve found in the trade journals, and the only mention of the Star I’ve found is in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory, in which it is the only house listed at Northfork.