Didn’t Expect to Find America’s Oldest Movie Theater Here | Post 9 | New Hampshire

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Across the USA

4 min readJan 18, 2016

Ruthie Foster and Bombino are playing at the Colonial Theatre in tiny Bethlehem, New Hampshire! It’s July 2014 as I click down Main Street — according to Google Street View — and the names of the Grammy-nominated blues singer-songwriter and the internationally-renowned Tuareg guitarist hang in black-caps simplicity above the ticket office at this far north venue, the oldest continually operated movie theater in the United States.

Well, sources say it’s “reputedly” or “one of” the oldest. Like the Mount Washington attractions I recently encountered, the Colonial Theatre is a relic of one of New England’s historical tourism booms. While Mount Washington was tarted up with the Cog Railway and summit hotels at the dawn of formal American tourism in the mid-19th century, the Colonial Theatre dates to 1915, the heyday of the “era of the grand hotels” and the New Hampshire version of the “grand tour”. Woodrow Wilson was president, Babe Ruth was beginning his career with the Boston Red Sox, the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat, and Mary Mallon was quarantined again — this time for the rest of her life — after starting a serious typhoid outbreak in New York City.

Disease — or freedom from and cure of, rather — was in fact one of the draws for this corner of northern New England. Many sought hay fever relief in the clear White Mountains air, and the 1920s saw the founding in Bethlehem of the Hebrew Hay Fever Relief Association, now defunct but a reason that Bethlehem today has an outsized Jewish population compared to similar northern New Hampshire towns.

The Colonial Theatre, a pre-Art Deco art deco building, was designed by Francis J. Kennard, the architect of numerous Florida hotels and public buildings, and targeted squarely at the pre-Depression summer resorters who packed the four trains stopping at Bethlehem daily and who lodged in the town’s 30+ hotels. The Colonial opened its doors on July 1, 1915, with a showing of Cecil DeMille’s silent film The Girl of the Golden West, a California Gold Rush tale with gamblers, sheriffs, and Wells-Fargo agents. The theatre’s website suggests that Bethlehem’s summer clientele was an ideal early-Hollywood test market due to its “diverse and cosmopolitan nature”.

As then, today the Colonial Theatre is a summer thing. Open from May to November only, the 300-seat venue shows independent films and hosts musicians, comedians, and the like. Dar Williams, Paula Poundstone, and Leo Kottke have performed here, and among the final acts of the 2015 season was Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars. The Colonial is on the National Register of Historic Places.

And yet, the view of Bethlehem from U.S. 302 — Main Street — is less “grand hotel” and more big-houses-now-B&Bs and failed motels.