Lebanon #21: Gem Theater

644 South Main Street

Gem Theater on October 21, 2006

The first theater in Lebanon was a small wood-frame building called the Empire Theater that was located on this site. This reinforced concrete theater with an arched façade was built around 1905 and was owned by Lebanon Mayor Charles Bruce Montague. (According to the records on the Linn County Assessor’s website, the building was built in 1940, however the arch can be glimpsed in the background of the 1920s photo at the top of the Lebanon Genealogical Society's Lebanon in the Early 1880s page.) By 1918, the theater was managed by R. “Cap” Kuhn as the Kuhn Theatre, and Kuhn purchased the building from the Montague estate with Joel C. Mayer for $10,000. In 1936, Kuhn built a new Kuhn Theatre on the adjacent property to the south, and this theater was renamed the Gem Theater. For a time after the theater closed, the building became a retail store called Mode O’ Day, and the arched façade was covered by sheet metal cladding. The facade has since been restored as shown here.

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