A Peek into Summers County’s Past: Travelling Tent Theaters

TALCOTT W.Va. (Hinton News) – I can remember since I was a little child my Grandfather Bernard Thompson and his best friend John Kessler talking about events from their childhood. They fondly recalled a traveling tent that would go from town to town and showed movies when they were small. 

There must have been at least 2 companies that did this during that time. The one Granddad referred to was “The Brownie Tent Show.” They said when they were children it would set up in the field at the mouth of Pie Hollow in Talcott, WV.

This was the closest area of vacant land in close proximity to the train depot and business district of Talcott. So the movie caught lots of “foot traffic.” Just last year, at the Ballangie Farm Club’s 90th Birthday Party for people in the community who are 90 and above I started talking to 93-year-old Mrs. Joyce Eugenia Mann about the history of Talcott.

Mrs. Mann was born and raised in Talcott, one of the things she talked about was a movie tent show that would come to town when she was a child. It must have been the Brownie Tent Show. The one you see in the photo is of the Serial Traveling Movie Theatre when it was set up in Talcott on July 10, 1948.

Mrs. Mann is 93, as I said, and my grandfather was born in 1927. So for them to have talked about a traveling movie tent show from when they were children it had to be the Brownie Tent Show, as they would have been teenagers when the one in the photo set up in town.    

In doing research for this piece I ran across an interview Mrs. Mann did with the Register Herald in May of 2023 that I had forgotten about. It is called “Growing Up Black in Rural West Virginia.” Since Granddad and she grew up together in Talcott, she often talks about many of the historical facts of Talcott that I had always heard about from Granddad since I was a child.

Just this past week at this year’s 90th birthday party Mrs. Mann was asked “what her favorite Christmas gift was as a child?” To which she said, It wasn’t really a gift but we always got an apple, orange and walnuts from C.N. Allen’s Store for Christmas when I was a child. She added that at some point in her childhood, she later got a doll. I remember Granddad telling similar stories about C.J.’s Store over the years. In July of this year, I had written a piece on C.J.’s Store in Talcott.