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The Turnage Theater: A brief (mostly accurate) history

C.A. Turnage brought live entertainment to Washington, North Carolina in 1913, when he leased the second floor of this Main Street building and built a vaudeville theater above the storefronts.

Patrons climbed a long flight of stairs to access the theater, where they were rewarded with a variety of acts performed by traveling vaudevillians who had arrived in Washington by train or boat.

But times were changing, and films became more popular than vaudeville. So Turnage adapted, installing a screen and showing silent movies. When “talkies” came along in the late 1920s, he adapted once again. However, the only ventilation in the theater came from open windows on the street side, and outside noises overwhelmingly competed with the movies’ dialogue.

To rectify the problem, Turnage leased the land behind his vaudeville theater and built a new, state-of-the-art, windowless movie theater in 1930, modeling it after New York City’s Palace Theater. He was sure that “talkies” would be a passing fancy and that, one day, people would clamor for live entertainment again, so he included a stage and an orchestra pit in his plans.

The new theater was so successful Turnage opened another theater across the street, where he showed “B” movies and a succession of Westerns. He named the movie house Reita Theater, after his wife. For nearly fifty years, Turnage’s theaters featured the only shows in town. Everything changed in the 1970s, with the opening of the Carmike cineplex.

Audiences flocked to the new theater, leaving the older, somewhat rundown Turnage Theater behind. As the years went by and maintenance of the ornate theater became more and more expensive, management decided to cut costs by hiding the plasterwork behind dropped ceilings and heavy curtains. They roped off the balcony stairs and dimmed the lights to a level just below acceptable.

Regardless of the sad state of the Turnage Theater, it did its best to carve out a niche in the market. It forayed into the world of blue movies and tapped into the Kung Fu craze, a move that kept the doors open until the end of 1978, after which the theater went dark, presumably permanently.

For nearly twenty years, the theater remained hidden behind sheets of plywood. Only resident pigeons roosted in the balcony, taking over the theater as their own and leaving an indelible mark on the premises. In the mid-1990s, local residents made plans to evict the feathered tenants and restore the Turnage Theater to its former glory, forming the Turnage Theaters Foundation.

A decade of dedicated fundraising and restoration led to a gala re-opening on November 3, 2007, unveiling C.A. Turnage’s most ambitious gift to Washington as better than new.

The mission of the Turnage Theaters Foundation is to enrich and cultivate the heritage of the community by authentically restoring, and effectively operating the Turnage Theaters, establishing a cultural center to be used for the performing arts, community gatherings, educational programs, corporate expos and meetings, and private functions for residents and visitors of Eastern North Carolina.

The Turnage Theaters building, located at 150 West Main Street, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing building to the Washington, North Carolina Historic District.