The Dunklin Theatre

On November 18, 1914, Southsiders learned that a large theater was to be built at 115 East Dunklin Street. The proprietors were George Bartholomaeus, who worked in a state office, and Frank E. Jones, who was shortly to become county assessor. The builder was Carl Franke, and the cost was projected at $12,000–$15,000.

This is how the building looks today.




The building faces about 50 feet on Dunklin and extends 120 feet to the north. The theater had a sloping floor of one inch to one foot, taking advantage of the natural slope of the ground north toward Wears Creek.




The seating capacity was 1,000–1,200, including the balcony (a later estimate, however, was 900 seats). Newspapers reported that plans for “opera chairs, inclined floor and an ample stage, as well as electric fixtures of the latest design, will all go to make the house a thing of beauty, convenience and comfort to guests.” The facade, 22 feet high, was “finished in buff brick, trimmed in light cream and terra cotta.” Windows and doors had decorative framing, and the facade was topped with five ornamental urns.

Photos of the building when it was a theater are lacking, but a slightly later photo, taken in the early 1920s when the building housed the Jefferson Moline Tractor and Implement Company, gives an idea of the original look.




The theater opened to a full house at two performances¬¬—that is, nearly two thousand attended—on May 29, 1915, with the name Southside Theatre. The opening show featured the silent film Damon and Pythias.

The film, six reels long, was one of the first feature-length films produced in the United States. It was evidence that the proprietors were bringing to the Southside the most up-to-date entertainment using the newest technology. Admission was 5 and 10 cents.




St. Peter’s Orchestra and vocalist Mrs. Louis Rephlo provided local musical talent during intermissions, as film reels were being changed. Background music during the silent film came from an Orchestrion, an instrument like an oversized player piano but intended to sounding more like a full orchestra. Orchestrions generally came complete with “bells and whistles” and were attached to organ pipes for greater volume.

Here are a few examples of some vintage Orchestrions, so you can imagine what going to a movie was like back then.







A contest was held in June to find a name for the theater. Four Southside women entered the same name, “Dunklin Theatre,” and had to share the five-dollar prize.

A lot happened at “the Dunklin,” as it came to be known. Two Southside youths, Winnie Bassmann and Otto Busch, rented space in the lobby to sell candy, ice cream, and soft drinks. Harold Doty won the prettiest baby contest. Seventeen-year-old Southsider Carl Walz, later to be county sheriff, won a pie-eating contest. All of this was great fun for Southsiders!

In September 1915 the theater showed the first motion pictures of the laying of the cornerstone of the new State Capitol and also rare “pictures” of bayonet charges in the “Great European War” (World War I) into which the United States had not yet entered.

Bartholomaeus sold his share of the theater to partner Jones in August 1915. The theater closed for a while for repairs, then reopened to a big show on January 3, 1916. Broadway School children attended a special show for them and their friends.

In addition to silent movies and vaudeville, the Dunklin held wrestling matches and other common entertainments of the day, including acrobatic and black-face minstrel shows.




In April 1916 Jones sold the entire building for $30,000 to Starrel McCall, a Fulton banker. The spacious basement was to be fitted up for an overall factory, which would employ a “large number of girls” and “add another splendid industry to the Southside.” However, the factory never came about.

In June 1916 the Dunklin Theatre showed the multiple-reel film The Birth of a Nation, possibly the most famous (or infamous) of all American silent films. It had just been released in 1915 and created widespread controversy because of its racism. In film promoted the growth and popularity of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide, including Jefferson City.



On September 27, 1916, the Republican party chose the Dunklin Theatre for a rally because “this is the largest available place in the city. More people can be seated there than in the hall of representatives.” Judge Henry Lamm, Republican candidate for governor in the forthcoming November election, spoke. Local journalists described the scene: “The spacious theatre was crowded to overflowing and people stood in the lobby trying to get a look at the candidate and hear his speech.”

Later in that important election year, African American Republicans also held a rally at the Dunklin; this event was called “one of the biggest rallies in the history of the city.”




In November 1916, local papers announced that the Dunklin had come under control of the International Theatre Company of Chicago, with David Miller and Edward Mann, both of Chicago, as managers. A grand reopening was set for Saturday, December 2, 1916, with the five-reel silent film Prince of Graustark and vaudeville entertainment. Flowers were given to ladies; admission cost 10 and 15 cents.

For nearly a month, the new owners filled the Dunklin by showing films and vaudeville five nights a week, and playing Charlie Chaplin films in the afternoon for children.

Edward Mann, one of the new managers, must have been a pretty good singer, too:




Here is one of the songs Mann performed, sung by John McCormack, the fellow who made it famous:





The Dunklin was competing with three other theaters in Jefferson City, all uptown: the Jefferson, the Gem, and the Grand. When the Grand on High Street showed The Unborn, Mayor Thomas spoke out strongly against movies that are “simply lascivious and appeal to the sensuous.” “The vamp movie and sex movie must go,” he proclaimed. Already in those early years of movies, local sensibilities were being pushed to the limit. (At least in some respects.)




Apparently, the Dunklin Theatre showed no movies after Christmas 1916. Managers instead turned to hosting popular wrestling and boxing events, promoted by the newly formed Athletic Association of Jefferson City. The first was on January 19, 1917, and featured the world welterweight champion Joe Cutrer against Jefferson City’s own Bill Bemboom. The matches drew a large crowd, and, with no radio yet, the newspapers reported action, hold by hold, and blow by blow.

The Dunklin Theatre could not compete with High Street movie houses, in part because it was not on the streetcar line. In spring 1917 it closed forever as a theater, after less than two years of operation. The big building with its ornate facade became a vacant “white elephant” on the Southside’s main street.

But Southsiders were not totally deprived of movies, which were rapidly gaining in popularity. On July 13, 1920, Central Evangelical Church (now Central United Church of Christ), just a couple blocks away, began showing silent movies in the spacious auditorium of its new Sunday School building and provided orchestra music, minstrels, and vaudeville while reels were changed, just as the Dunklin Theatre had. The Apple Tree Girl opened to a large crowd and was the first of a long series of films at the church during the 1920s.

On July 14, 1920, Southsiders learned the Dunklin Theatre building would become the Jefferson Moline Tractor and Farm Implement Store.




After being a farm implement store, the structure served a variety of other purposes, including Griesedick and Budweiser beer distribution centers; restaurants (where a man was murdered!); a novelty company; the Glad Tidings Tabernacle, an Assembly of God Church; a grocery; and a photography studio. Most recently, the building housed Coleman Appliance. In 2010, Central Dairy acquired it.

Stay tuned to this blog for the continuing story of “the Dunklin”!

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Much of the information for this post comes from four Jefferson City newspapers: the German-language Missouri Volksfreund, the Daily Post, the Daily Capital News, and the Democrat-Tribune. Photo of the building as a farm implement store from the collection of Don Walz.

Copyright 2012 by Walter A. Schroeder.

How Dad’s Barbershop Was Integrated

Jefferson City was a racially segregated town all through World War II and the postwar years. Black people had to sit in designated rows in the back of movie theaters, could not enter certain businesses, were not served in restaurants, and went to their own schools from kindergarten through university. That’s the way it was . . . sad to say.

In our daily life, my family didn’t interact much with the black community, although quite a few black families lived scattered around Jefferson City’s Southside. My dad was a barber, and his shop was at 508 Madison (where the Central Motor Bank now is), directly across Madison Street from the Junior College (now the Miller Performing Arts Center).




Dad’s barbershop sat between two black churches. The Quinn Chapel A.M.E. church and parsonage was on the corner of Madison and Miller (500–502 Madison), and the Zion A.M.E. church and parsonage was at 514 Madison, next to the alley. Dad counted the churches’ preachers and several of their members who lived on Miller Street as friends.

Mom and Dad taught their sons to be respectful of “colored people,” as they were then called, and we were. We had no reason to be otherwise. Dad had grown up in New Haven, Missouri, a small community of people of German descent, and told us how the colored people there, like the white people, spoke both English and German. I had a hard time imagining colored people speaking German. I suppose both Dad and Mom used the term “colored people” because that’s what their German-speaking parents called them in German, die Farbige.

Black soldiers returning in 1945 from fighting in World War II did not want to resume living in a segregated society, which clearly treated them as second-class citizens. They and the progressive faculty and students at Lincoln University were pushing to integrate Jefferson City well before the landmark national court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

Our family and others sensed that integration was coming to Jefferson City in those postwar years. The question was when and how. One evening at the supper table, where we discussed the day’s events, Dad was visibly worried. “Edna,” he said, as if this was a topic for her only and not for us boys, “they say that the colored people are going to force integration of the white businesses.” “Edna,” he repeated Mom’s name as if asking for help, “they are going to come to the barbershops and test them. What am I going to do?” Mom was quick and clear in her reply: “You cut their hair, of course!” “But Edna, I have never cut a colored man’s hair. Their hair is different. I just don’t know how. They never taught us how.” (“They” referred to Moler Barber College in St. Louis, where he learned barbering in the 1920s.) Dad was truly worried he would botch up their hair badly and trouble would follow. “Well,” Mom said, “you can tell them that, but you still have to invite them to sit in your chair to get a haircut.” In addition, Dad feared that some of his regular customers would stop coming if he accepted black men in his shop.

Days passed, and I forgot about Dad’s deep worry and fear. He was a perfectionist in cutting hair and wanted to do the right thing by the “colored people.” Then one evening, again at the supper table, came the result. Dad reported that two black men had come into his barbershop that morning, hung up their coats, took seats on the bench, and waited their turns without saying a word. When their turns came, Dad invited one to the chair with his usual smile, and the fellow stood up and politely replied something like, “Thank you, Mr. Schroeder, but we were just seeing if you would serve us. We have our own barbers.” Then the two men put on their coats and quietly left.

That’s all there was to it. Later, Dad and other local barbers got instructions from the union on how to cut black men’s hair, and he was better prepared when others came in. He did get a few black customers—men he already knew and who knew him—but there were plenty of black barbers in town to serve the town’s black men, and they depended on them for customers. Dad never reported that any of his white customers stopped coming because he was willing to cut the hair of black men.

The barbershop had been integrated!

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

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The Munichburg neighborhood, then and now, celebrates its ethnic diversity! Join the Old Munichburg neighborhood association, and help keep this district a proud, vibrant part of Jefferson City!