A few weeks ago, we published an old postcard depicting Cohn's Theatre. We'd never heard of it before and asked readers to tell us about it.
Concord history buff and cool bean Earl Burroughs responded with this message:
The Cohn Theater was located on School Street in the area of the parking garage. The date of the building on the card would be 1912. I included that picture in my book, “A Pictorial Glimpse of Concord, NH's Past,” a copy of which is at the library.
It later became the Sterling Theater. In later years (1950s) the building housed the American Legion.
Hopefully this will be of some help.
Earl
Mystery solved! Right? Well, we thought so but realized that we'd need a little more information to get an article out of this, so we started digging.
We were able to corroborate the theater's location on School Street, but the location was referred to Conn's Theatre.
In a 1915 edition of The Granite Monthly, Captain Jacob Conn is said to have purchased the old Durgin silverware factory on School Street after it was destroyed by fire in 1911. That year, he laid the cornerstone for what would be come Conn's Theatre, which opened in 1912. The Granite Monthly also reported that Conn was to open a “modern picture house” at the site of the Dunklee stable on Pleasant Street, but we weren't able to find much about the second theater.
It would seem that the first postcard we published had a typo, unless the name changed again, which would just be confusing.
We e-mailed Earl back about this craziness, and he trucked over to the Concord Room of the Concord Public Library, hoping to find the theater in the old directories. No such luck – he said directories didn't include streets back then. (How people in the early 1900s found anything is beyond me.)
If you have anything to add to this curious Concord mystery, e-mail news@theconcordinsider.com or leave a comment here.
April 28, 2023
I think that the old Cohn Theater building was on the right side of School St.heading west from Main and the American Legion was housed across the street, not in that Cohn Theater bldg. I may be very wrong but I am an old Concord native who does remember my home town pretty well.