Vermont Theatre
217 North Main Street,
Vermont,
IL
61484
217 North Main Street,
Vermont,
IL
61484
No one has favorited this theater yet
Additional Info
Functions: Bowling Alley, Retail
Previous Names: Vermont Opera House, Vaudeville Theater, Princess Theatre
Nearby Theaters
The town of Vermont, Illinois had three different theatres on Main Street. So this entry will handle all three. The first was the Vaudeville Theater which booked live acts before adding film to the mix. The 500-seat hall had been the Vermont Opera House beginning in the late-19th Century and likely found that vaudeville plus films was a little less risky to book.
The Princess Theatre opened by W.C. Geer and was exclusively used for motion pictures. The theatre had just 175 seats and was also in a location in North Main Street - likely a converted retail building. Despite its diminutive size, it’s one of the most documented small-town theatres in the nation in the mid-1920s thanks to Geer’s reportage of each film from a period roughly from 1924 to 1927. It appears that Geer was unable to convert the venue to sound and the Princess Theatre closed.
The town got one last hope for film exhibition viability when the old Vermont Opera House was reopened as the Vermont Theatre. It was part of a Dale Kennedy Circuit of 21 small town movie houses that switched to lower cost 16mm films in 1940. Theatres in nearby Table Grove (just about five miles away), Astoria (8 miles away), and Blandinsville appear to be in that circuit. The 362 seat count auditorium was certainly enough to handle the traffic of Vermont, Table Grove and Ipava.
The 16mm operation appears to have failed fairly quickly and the theatre appears to have been equipped with or switched back to 35mm projection. And it out survived the Table Grove Theatre (ceasing operations in 1947). Like many small-town theatres, the Vermont Theatre scuffled in the TV age. Local businesses banded together to reopen the venue under the operation of K.C. Kessler in May of 1954. Shoppers could obtain free movie passes to attend films. But that failed and the theatre closed permanently in January of 1955.
Like many theatres of the period, it was converted to a bowling alley - much like the Amus-U Theatre in La Harpe, Illinois. The long running Vermont Bowl lanes were still in operation in the 2020’s.
Contributed by
dallasmovietheaters
Want to be emailed when a new comment is posted about this theater?
Just login to your account and subscribe to this theater.
Recent comments (view all 1 comments)
Running three theaters together in one listing is unnecessary and confusing. In addition, some of the information is wrong. The bowling alley was not the opera house. That building doesn’t appear on the 1906 map, and the 1928 map shows it selling tractors and implements.
The correct address for the Vaudeville/Vermont is 106-108 N Main. That building was constructed in 1869 as a bank, and the opera house was upstairs. It was originally called Mershon’s Hall. A bank is still in part of the ground floor, the rest may be vacant. The 1928 Sanborn shows nothing for the second floor, so the opera house was likely closed for a time, probably during the existence of the Pastime.
The correct address for the Pastime is 215 N Main. It was located in the northern storefront of the Leighty Building, a simple block of one story storefronts. The theater is still shown on the 1928 map. The 1906 map shows a clothing store here. This building does not appear on the 1900 map. The building appears to be used by the American Legion. It’s in decent shape. This should be split out into its own listing, and the extraneous information removed from this one.