The town’s theater, then known as the New Lyceum, showed a cartoon, a movie like Our Gang (featuring the Little Rascals) or The Three Stooges, and then a feature—usually a Western.
“I remember cowboy Tom Mix with his pearl-handled guns. Of course, he won all the gun fights,” Biddle says.
From its opening in October 1928, the art-deco bijou theater nestled on High Street between Stam’s Hall and the stately Imperial Hotel was the place to go for entertainment in the Eastern Shore town.
“It was a very important part of our lives,” says Ann Wilmer Hoon, 83. “That’s what there was to do in Chestertown: the movies, basketball games at the armory, or roller skating on the streets.”
During the nearly two decades that the Russell family ran the New Lyceum, moviegoers witnessed the popularization of talkies and the introduction of color films. When C.A. Wingfield and F.B. Klein took over the theater in 1946, they renovated the place and reopened it as the Chester Theatre, the name it would go by for the next 40-plus years.
Like so many other venues in Kent County and the South, the Chester Theatre was segregated into the 1960s, recalls William Pickrum, who grew up in Kent. Pickrum saw his first movie ever at the Chester, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, in 1953.
He remembers having to use a separate staircase to access the second level of the balcony, where blacks were required to sit.
“It was unfortunate, but those were the cultural surroundings of the time,” Pickrum says.
C.E. “Pete” Prince, a former Vaudevillian with an undying love for the movies and entertainment, purchased the theater in 1957.
“I grew up in that theater,” says Pete’s daughter, Faith Prince, of Chestertown. “I think I saw every movie ever made—the great ones and the stinkers.
“I saw Mary Poppins 312 times. Disney movies and Elvis always did well. My dad loved those.”
Prince’s mother, Kit, a proper Southern lady, was less enamored of some of the movies and persuaded her husband to subtly rename a couple on the marquee to “Village of the Darned” and “One Foot in Heck,” Prince recalls.
Pete Prince ran the theater until his death in 1988, and his wife continued management for several years after that.
It reopened briefly in the early 1990s as the Royal Prince Theatre, with the lobby partitioned off to bring in extra money from retail shops. But by the mid 1990s, the Prince, like so many other single-screen downtown movie theaters, succumbed to competition from multiplexes and video rentals.
The beloved old building was saved from the fate of becoming a mail-order-catalog center when it was bought by Susan Kerns and her then husband, Ron.
“We wanted to bring the theater back to the way it was to preserve our history and make it available to the entire community,” she says.
The Kerns spent years researching and then renovating the interior of the theater to its late-1920s look, complete with the original color scheme of forest green, burgundy, and gold leaf.
The revamped theater became home to the nonprofit Prince Theatre Foundation, which, since 2003, has been using it for a resident theater troupe, summer camp, guest performers, playwrights’ group, open-mic nights, and a variety of other performances and community gatherings.
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