3. Historic Movie House

Mr. Monday Sonday, the local high school coach, decided to go into business. He acquired the building where the store had been and converted it into a movie house. Electricity had not come to Circleville at that time, so he figured out a way to get the power the movie projector required by rigging the rear wheels of his car with a belt that ran from the wheel to a generator that supplied the needed power to run the movie projector. There were problems with this setup, but it worked well enough to be functional, and so the movies came to Circleville. The movies were all silent back then and the words spoken by the actors were shown at the bottom of the screen. A movie was shown once a week and people looked forward to this new kind of entertainment. When Mr. Sonday bought a movie house in Richfield, he sold the Circleville Movie House to Earl Whittaker. Earl operated it in the same location for a while, but the Movie House was remarkably close to the cheese factory which had a smell and a lot of flies. These caused problems for movie patrons. Because of this and when electricity came to Circleville in 1930, Earl built a new movie house on Main Street.