Motion pictures have been around a relatively short time, barely a hundred years all totaled. And it really wasn’t until 1905 that most of the working class had a chance to see a movie, since before that time they were shown in the larger vaudeville theaters, a place the average working family could not afford.

Then, on June 19, 1905, an extraordinary thing happened. Harry Davis, a real-estate dealer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania decided to open a small theater devoted strictly to the showing of movies, an unheard of thing before that time. The motion picture had not become a respected form of entertainment in the middle and upper class yet. In fact, movies were used as ‘chasers’ in the vaudeville theaters as a way to run the crowd out before the beginning of the next set of performances.

Davis named the ninety-six seat theater the Nickelodeon. The first attraction was The Great Train Robbery and it was a hit! Before long theaters of this type began popping up all across the country. With an admission price of only a nickel, the average man could afford to take his wife and children to see this wonderful new invention full of lights and sound and wonder. Sometimes a vaudeville act, a lecture or a slide show accompanied the fifteen minutes or so of film

As usual, Dayton was in the thick of things. In 1896 the Park theater (which was eventaully renamed the Mayfair), presented the first motion pictures in Dayton. In 1906 Dayton’s first "all-movies" picture house opened in a converted storeroom on Third Street, near Jefferson Street. Nicknamed "The Electric" it was an immediate success, even though reports at the time stated that there was a bit of trouble during the showing of the first picture. Strong men paled and women and children shrieked during a scene where an on-coming train, with a puffing and snorting engine, seemed to be headed toward the audience. One woman, judging that the train was really bearing down on her, remarked "I’m shore getting out of this joint" as she grabbed her children and left the theater.

Gilbert Burrows, one time manager of the National theater (which later became the Strand), remembered how the picture flickered and jumped and wobbled all over the sheet that was suspended as a temporary screen from the drop curtain.

"At times I thought it (the scene) would leap clear off the stage," said Burrows, "but the operator finally succeeded in holding the images fairly within the limits of the crude curtain by standing on one of the projector’s legs."

More than half of the first movies made were nonfiction. The ones that were not didn’t have much of a plot. Who needed one when people were amazed just to see a train go by in an enclosed room, watch as butterflies filled the screen and look at exotic cities like Paris or London.

By 1910, however, movies were being made that flew men to the moon. Women were trying to get their hair to curl like Mary Pickford’s, and Los Angeles annexed the incorporated village of Hollywood.

Things would never be the same...

Return to When Dayton Went to the Movies Home Page