The Braswell Theater opened in Demopolis on October 23, 1902, with a performance of the melodrama Unorna in galleries above Frederick Henry Braswell’s hardware store on Strawberry Avenue, and it served as a local stage for operas, plays, and minstrel shows into the 1920s. Alabama silent screen star Henry B. Walthall appeared there live in Taken In on April 15, 1921. The Elks Theater, the city’s first picture show, opened on October 1, 1915, in a building constructed by John Cox Webb, Jr., at the corner of Strawberry and Washington Streets. Harry Simon and Tom Nonnenmacher, partners in the Braswell Theater, acquired the Elks and reopened it as the Si-Non on February 1, 1916. The Si-Non featured silent motion pictures and celebrity appearances, including boxer Jack Dempsey and escape artist Harry Houdini, until 1929, when it began a regular schedule of talkies. After a management change in January 1931, it operated as the Lido Theater for its final four years. On September 14, 1935, the Marengo Theater opened at Washington and Cedar as Demopolis’s exclusive showplace for movies, where a capacity crowd watched Two for Tonight and a telephone call from Jean Harlow to Mayor N.C. Floyd became the evening’s highlight. Originally operated by an Atlanta company, the Marengo was purchased in 1940 by Henry W. Webb, its first local owner.