Small Town Noir

The Warner brothers opened their first cinema in a converted room on the ground floor of the old Knox hotel on South Mill street in 1905, when John Whitten was six years old. Harry Warner bought the fixtures and fittings from Whitten’s hardware store on East Washington street, which was owned by John’s father, who helped the Warners install the chairs that they rented from a nearby funeral parlour. The cinema did well, and the […]

Sam Wilson was arrested for burglary in 1937, but there is no record of the case. At the time, he was living in an apartment above the Davis Coal and Supply Company store on Moravia street with his wife and five children. A decade earlier, he had a place above the Gloria Tire and Rubber Works, two blocks away, and made money working in a limestone quarry and selling bootleg wine. It was a wild […]