Prior to the advent of motion pictures, amusement in Northfield took many forms. At the Lyceum, built just a year after the town was established in 1855, residents gathered to hear local lecturers, debaters and musicians. The Lockwood Opera House which opened in 1872, presented popular vaudeville acts and minstrel shows as well as plays such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1899 “high class” theater found a permanent home in Northfield at The Ware Auditorium (or, The Grand, as it was renamed in 1916) which presented first-rate acts, and eventually films, that came through the town.
Among the many new acts that began to flood Northfield was Lyman Howe’s “High Class Moving Pictures.” Presenting popular travelogues designed to transport audiences to exotic locales, Howe’s pictures truly brought the world to Northfield and showed viewers sights they could hitherto only dream of, as well as showcasing the greatest technological feats of the time.
By the time Howe’s films came to Northfield (at least as early as 1909, my research has found) he was already well established on the East coast, known for the unusually good quality of his projections and for selecting only the most “high-class” films for his exhibitions.
Howe 
presented “educational,” generally inoffensive motion pictures to small towns across America—to become perhaps the best-known and most successful traveling exhibitor in America. And though Howe himself would retire from traveling long before his films came to Northfield, the values that made his name synonymous with quality ensured the continued growth and success of his company, as it took its show on the road and set out to conquer the American
Midwest.
Howe’s company advertised conspicuously and heavily in Northfield, taking out large, elaborately illustrated advertisements almost always accompanied by an article praising the program’s educational value. For example, when Howe’s pictures came to the town in March 1912, two weeks prior to the exhibition, the Northfield News carried were two articles and no less than four illustrated advertisements.
By packaging himself as “high class” Howe was able to capitalize on the public’s demand for entertainment “of good taste.” With the new choices industrialization made possible in everything from what clothes one could wear, to what one could eat, and, of course, how one could spend one’s leisure time, it is little wonder people looked for guidance in navigating this new cultural terrain.
Public opinion regarding the movies in Northfield reached an all-time low in 1916 as citizens wrote to the two local papers, the Northfield News and the Northfield Independent, concerned about everything from the depiction of smoking onscreen to the content of such controversial pictures as Birth of a Nation (1915), with discussion of the need for censorship of the motion pictures coming to a head in April of that year. One not atypical letter to appear in the Northfield News that year asserted,
“Thru rumor, a knowledge of several, most objectionable plays has come to me and I voice the feelings of most parents when I say that something should be done immediately to change the tone of the pictures now being put before the youth of our city."
Despite this, when Lyman H. Howe's travel pictures came through the town in May 1916, his films were not only heartily embraced but, in fact, held up as paragons of the merits of film exhibition.
Howe was able to appeal to Northfield residents looking for “highbrow” entertainment by exhibiting his films at “respectable” venues – churches, opera houses, the town’s most prestigious theaters and steering clear of “low-class” nickelodeons. In Northfield, Howe’s films were shown only at The Ware Auditorium/Grand. 
Indeed, the history of the various venues at which one would see motion pictures in Northfield reflects the class stratification of the community. Each venue carried with it a reputation and acted, in many ways, as a cultural signifier. That is, the venue to which one would go to see films became indicative of one’s class.
The Lyric, for example, catered to working-class men and showed mostly serials and also exhibited the most “risqué” films. “We would like to ask the Lyric why it is a necessity to put on films which have a strong tendency to lead young boys and girls straight to the devil?” a citizen identifying himself as “A Believer in Movies” wrote into the Northfield News in 1916. In morally a conservative town as Northfield, such complaints were taken seriously and the Lyric lost its license to operate in 1916. The Northfield News wrote: “The chief complaint against the Lyric…was the condition of the building, which was condemned from a sanitary standpoint. Furthermore the criticism against the type of films shown at the Lyric had been very severe.”
Howe’s films were able to avoid the controversy of common, “vulgar” serials and melodramas was by presenting “educational” and thoroughly inoffensive films that avoided any sort of tawdry melodrama or risqué subject matter. There could be nothing controversial about the documentary features Howe presented and the press he received in the Northfield News, such as this article from the April 3, 1914, edition, reflects this: Howe Pictures Please. The Lyman Howe travel pictures entertained many at the Auditorium Friday evening. Pictures of the Panama Canal were the feature of the evening and were educational as well as interesting. Impossible comic pictures puzzled as well as amused. The nature pictures are of a high class and never fail to please. The Lyman Howe pictures always meet with a hearty welcome.
The operative words here are, of course, “high class” and “educational.” Howe’s documentaries derived the majority of their appeal from being wholly inoffensive so that patrons of the movies didn’t need to worry about what might be on the screen when they attended one of his exhibitions. As this article, from May 19, 1916, makes clear, a Howe program was for the whole family:
A Lyman Howe night is a big night for many Northfield families as the youngsters all go and every member of the family has a good time. Howe’s pictures are wonderfully clear, and true to life, are very educational, and their presentation is made very effective and realistic by the work of the men behind the screen who furnish the “noise.”
Felton’s animated cartoons are uproariously funny and provoke more laughs in a minute than the coarse buffoonery of Charlie Chaplin can produce in a week – granted, of course, that you have an intelligent audience, and that’s the type that Howe’s Travel Festival attracts.
Howe’s pictures had brought the world to Northfield; with the advent of World War I, however, Northfield residents were now going out into the world and, suddenly, the detached, pseudo-documentary, vaguely ethnographic films Howe was marketing seemed unable to adequately capture the intensity of the times, to tell stories that people could see their loved ones taking part in. Indeed, almost every week during the height of the war the Northfield News devoted a portion of its front page to the town’s men who had been drafted, as well as running regular features that printed letters from the men on the front.
When Howe came through Northfield in 1919 with a program presenting scenes of the Canadian Rockies and tarpon fishing, it is little wonder that they were not as popular as stories with the immediate, visceral impact promised by D.W. Griffith’s WWI drama Hearts of the World (1918) or the overtly propagandistic To Hell with the Kaiser (1918).
While Howe’s travelogues were being characterized as “educational” and “interesting” To Hell with the Kaiser was being described as “stirring” and “filled with scenes of such intense interest that they have not failed to bring spectators to their feet wherever it has been shown.
Howe’s company surely sensed that its films’ popularity was waning. Indeed, his films came to Northfield in 1919 with an exhibition that purported to offer a peek into the lives of major stars of the day, including Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Indeed, the show was clearly a stab at capitalizing on the popularity of these newly created movie stars and with it Howe’s company seems to express a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality that suggests he was aware the heyday of the travelogue had passed and that nickelodeons and star-driven studio productions were the wave of the future. This was the last time that Howe’s films came through Northfield and, indeed, by 1920 his company had folded.
