The Corral Theatre

The Corral Theatre was an open-air cinema fenced in with cedar, and for about seventy years it showed movies under the Wimberley night sky. Twin brothers Roy and Ray Avey built it around 1948 just off the Wimberley square, walling it with upright cedar saplings like a frontier stockade. They later sold it to Carol Knolk, known as Mama Knolk, who had run Rocky River Ranch, a girls' summer camp on the Blanco River, since 1953. In 1966 she moved the theatre to the ranch on Flite Acres Road, replacing the saplings with sawn cedar fencing. Seating was a few chairs and a small set of bleachers, and regulars brought folding chairs of their own. Shows began at dusk on summer weekends, weather permitting, from the first weekend in May through Labor Day. For most of its life the Corral ran on antique equipment: carbon-arc projectors built in 1926, later replaced by a pair from 1932. The theatre billed itself as the original walk-in outdoor theatre and showed first-run films. Keeping that up became the problem when the studios stopped shipping 35 mm prints. The digital projector it needed was far beyond what the theatre earned, since it rarely made a profit, and a community fundraiser paid for the conversion. Rocky River Ranch passed to Mary Anderson, who came from Lubbock in 1966 to work at the camp and bought it with her colleague Sandra Bateman in 1971, and then into the hands of her niece Rue Hatfield, who had first come as a camper in 1967. The Corral's last season was around 2019, and by 2024 it was listed as permanently closed.