Dalton Theatre Building

Virginia

A small Virginia town once had the biggest stage on the whole rail line from Richmond to Tennessee.

historicalculture

When it opened in nineteen twenty-one in Pulaski, the Dalton Theatre had the largest stage of any theater on the rail line running from Richmond all the way down to Tennessee. It was built for vaudeville, so the acts came by train. The building made room for them. Three stories of brick, five bays wide, with a square tower on the flat roof. On the ground floor, two storefronts faced the street. One held a bank. The other was a drugstore. The upper floors held offices, and apartments where visiting performers stayed between shows. Behind all that sat the auditorium itself, under a gabled roof, done in Beaux Arts style, with a plain five-story tower beside it just to run the stage equipment. When talking pictures arrived, the vaudeville stage became a movie screen, and films played there into the nineteen sixties. In nineteen eighty-two the auditorium collapsed. What was left of it was razed. The front of the building still stands.

Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.

What this was written from
had the largest stage of any theaters on the rail line from Richmond, Virginia to Tennessee

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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