Going to the Movies in Fort Kent

A barn on the Stevens homestead

In 1904 the Fort Kent chapter of the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal benefit society, bought the Samuel Stevens homestead and opened up its refurbished barn as a community hall. Woodmen Hall, as everyone called it, did a bit of everything: club gatherings, town meetings, weddings, dances, basketball games, minstrel shows.

Around 1917 its owners installed projection equipment and added one more line to the roster — The Savoy Theatre. The first film shown was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. That barn stood where the cinema’s building and parking lot are today, which means Fort Kent has been watching movies on the same patch of ground for more than a century.

A dime, a folding chair, and a piano

The early Savoy was a make-do operation. For a dime, moviegoers sat on “rickety wooden folding chairs placed on the flat main floor or in the balcony,” as Ornstein has it, and watched silent pictures while a local pianist played beside the screen. She names three of them: Mrs. George Bradbury, Theresa Michaud and Burdina Wheelock.

Ownership churned. The Savoy changed hands in 1920 to Aroostook County Theaters Incorporated of Houlton; by 1928 it belonged to Publix Theatres, a national chain; a few years later to Julia M. Powers and Raymond R. Johnston, who ran houses in Caribou and Fort Fairfield, who in turn joined a Saint John, New Brunswick chain with more than fifty theaters either side of the border. A photograph survives of the building standing in the floodwater of 1923.

By the early 1930s it had stopped being a hall that showed films and become a cinema: 533 seats, a properly raked floor, a different picture six nights a week — and wired for sound. The Savoy’s first talkie was The Jazz Singer.

The theater under the convent

Fort Kent’s second cinema opened around 1939, and it was a parish project. Led by St. Louis Parish priest Rev. Aimé Giguère, volunteers converted the parish hall in the basement of the convent into a full 325-seat theater — ticket booth, raked seating, concession stand and all — to raise money for building the People’s Benevolent Hospital, known today as Northern Maine Medical Center.

The Petites sœurs franciscaines lived upstairs, with their chapel sitting directly above the theater. Sister Gloria Ouellette found evening prayer the hardest hour of the day: the soundtrack came up through the floor distinctly enough to tell one actor’s voice from another. For a decade or so, Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart and Lash La Rue were part of convent life.

Doors opened every night of the week, with a matinee on Saturdays. Admission was a dime, and a penny more once the war was on. The bill was mostly Hollywood, with French-language pictures worked in. Delsie Charette remembered French-Canadian classics bringing whole families in from the country. It closed in the early 1950s.

The two houses were rivals, and not politely: by the early 1940s the Savoy’s owners were working to squeeze the Community out. It ended in 1945, when Ashland native Charles A. H. Brooks bought the Savoy and went into partnership with the hospital corporation instead — handing it half the Savoy’s receipts and taking over management of both theaters.

Three hundred and fifty cars

In the summer of 1951 Brooks opened the 240-speaker Fort Kent Drive-In on the Caribou Road, again splitting the takings with the hospital fund. Between the Savoy and the drive-in, ticket receipts raised roughly $206,000 toward the People’s Benevolent Hospital, which opened in 1952. A hospital paid for, a dime at a time, by people going to the pictures.

The drive-in outlasted the Community Theatre by decades, run by Brooks, Dick Harvey, Clarence Levesque and Paul Dubois until 1989. Levesque remembered the All-Nighters best — dusk-to-dawn screenings on summer holiday weekends, 350 to 400 cars in the field.

The Century, and after

The Savoy found its last owners in 1969 — a local group incorporated as Century Theater, Inc., with W. J. Ouellette at its head. They put up a modern building next door, and the old one came down on December 9, 1969. The new house opened a week later as the Century, named for the town’s centennial.

Jeffrey Plourde bought it in 1988 and ran it as Plourde’s Century Theater. It later passed to the Paradis family, who kept it going until 2024, when it changed hands again and took its current name: Fort Kent Cinema.

The two screens are called the Century and the Savoy.