The purpose of this site is to make available to the public documents related to the history of early movie culture in Northfield during the "transitional era" in the American Cinema, 1907-1917, before the Hollywood film industry was fully consolidated as a viable commercial enterprise and theaters were showing movies on a regular basis. During this time, traveling exhibitors and small town entrepreneurs often presented movies to the public in available make-do venues--sometimes called nickelodeons or "electric theaters." The community of Northfield, with a population of approximately 3,200 people during the transitional era, was home to no fewer than four electric theaters on Division (Main) Street: the Star (est. 1908), the Gem (1910), the Grand (1914) and the Lyric (1914). By 1917, however, the Ware Auditorium, an 800-seat opera house built by A.K. Ware in 1899 and formerly dedicated to the staging of theatrical and vaudeville entertainments, emerges as Northfield's "sole municipal movie house."
Editorials both pro and con regarding the "movie habit" begin to appear in the pages of the local newspapers starting in 1910, but the public discourse reaches a crescendo in 1916, with members of four churches, various women's clubs, the Commercial Club, the mayor and city council weighing in. We are especially interested in the competing interests of these groups--economic and moral--regarding the "movie situation." Our project is in keeping with a growing trend in cinema studies to draw on the methodologies of cultural history and American studies in writing "bottom up" histories focusing on local rather than (or in addition to) national perspectives.
This site was developed by students enrolled in CAMS 345: Moviegoing & Film Exhibition in America, a course offered in the department of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. The documents were collected from archival resources housed in the Northfield Historical Society & Museum, the Northfield Public Library, Northfield City Hall, the Rice County Historical Society & Museum, and Carleton and St. Olaf College Archives. Our thanks to these organizations for allowing us access to resources and to the many people who assisted us in our research.
We are making every effort to ensure the reliability of information found on this site, including recording the sources and taking care to enter information using the same language and spellings as the original documents. The images are only rough "placeholders" for the higher quality ones we are currently producing and intending to add to the site.
Student Researchers:
Allison Dwyer, Alison Jarzyna, Andy Lauer, Matthew Moltaji
Faculty Research Advisor:
Carol Donelan, Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies, Carleton College