Movie Magic: Drift, Floyd County, Kentucky

In the spring of 1909, a US Post Office opened in the community of Drift, on the Left Fork of Beaver Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky. The creation of a post office was one step toward cementing a community in rural America. Although free home delivery in cities had been in place since 1863, rural free delivery received congressional approval only in 1893. Even after residents could receive mail at their homes, the post office remained the social hub of towns and small hamlets. But some 30 years after the creation of the post office in Drift, Kentucky, another community lodestone was built: a movie theater.

The circa 1940 building that contained businesses, apartments, AND the Drift movie theater.

In the decades after World War I, the movie theater took center stage in many rural towns as the heart of the community. In rural Kentucky, where “going to town” was often a weekly highlight (and it was usually just one trip a week) for families – attending the movies quickly became part of that ritual. The movies were an escape from reality, and the design of movie theaters helped reinforced that escape.

Circa 1946 photograph of a “crowd awaiting to attend a movie showing on Saturday night.” Presumably this is in Wheelwright, Kentucky, some 16 miles south of Drift. Image is from the Russell Lee: Wheelwright, KY Photographic Collection at the University of Kentucky.

Drift, so named either for a type of coal mine (essentially, a seam of coal accessed through a horizontal opening rather than a vertical slope or chute) or for driftwood on a local creek (there’s some disagreement about the origins of the name), grew rapidly after the railroad reached the area in 1917.

Section of a 1937 Kentucky Highway map showing Drift, Kentucky.

By 1919, there were three coal camps in Drift, and they employed 177 miners. But Drift was just one coal town in a line of coal towns (see map above). Demand for coal had reached such an extent by 1900 that mines (most owned by out-of-state interests) couldn’t hire all of the needed miners.

Coal companies needed to attract more workers, and this slowly led to an improvement in living conditions – and sometimes in the construction of company towns and housing for workers. Some amenities like swimming pools, baseball fields, and theaters were also occasionally built.

Changing shifts at the mine portal in the afternoon. Wheelwright, Floyd County. Circa 1946. Image from the Russell Lee Photographic Collection at the University of Kentucky.

The Drift Theater was located on the ground floor of a three-story brick building completed around 1940. I don’t know whether the construction of the theater was a private enterprise or one funded by a coal company.

The name of the original owner/builder varies according to who you ask: some folks attribute the construction to Ben David Martin, yet according to a family member, the theater was built by W.J. Turner.  This account states that the first theater building burned, and his son and wife, Ernest and Mae Turner, rebuilt the large building (easily the most commanding piece of architecture in Drift).

The original ticket counter for the theater, and double entry doors to either side.

The façade of the building is fairly spare, with five bays on the ground floor, and then 10 bays on the second and third stories. The windows are eight-light steel casement windows, separated by brick pilasters with tapered concrete (or stone, it is hard to tell from the ground) caps.

Detail of the cornice of the building.

The cornice of the building is where the influence of the Art Moderne style shines – stylized stone pediments span the top of two pilasters, and are echoed in the pediment of the stepped parapet, which has a stone coping. Stone “diamonds” with a incised sunburst pattern (the closest I can come to describing the detail) further accent the cornice level.

A circa 1932 photograph of a crowd in front of the Strand in Lexington, Kentucky. Image from the Lafayette Studios Collection at the University of Kentucky.

The Drift Theater  had one screen and 150 seats. In 1946, the peak of the movie industry’s attendance figures, 90 million people a week attended the movies in America. A rise in leisure time and disposable income for many Americans helped fuel the growth of the movie industry, and the accompanying theaters that were built all across the country.

The north section of the building may have been built later, or just received a different cladding of glazed bricks.

The northern section of the building bears an inscription that reads “19 * W.J.Turner*49,” suggesting that this section of the building was built at a later date (1949). It is also three stories in height, with a five bay wide façade, and is clad in smooth glazed yellow bricks. This part of the building has no additional ornamentation on the façade.

The post office wasn’t always in this building, and this space was originally a hardware store.

The two buildings held a hardware store, a café, the theater, a doctor’s office, a bathhouse for miners in the basement, and on the upper stories, apartments. The Turner family ran the theater for many years.

Mechanization and decreased demand for coal in the mid-1950s led to the closure of many coal camps. People left the area seeking higher education and employment, and usually didn’t return. Many coal camp buildings were demolished across Kentucky, and the those that remain – like the Drift Theater building – stand empty, silent, waiting. The Saturday crowds eating and visiting and watching a movie have vanished, with only bricks, metal, and glass left to contain the memories.