Crighton Theatre

George Strake struck oil outside Conroe in December 1931, and this theatre is what one man did with his share of it. Harry Moore Crighton was the town pharmacist and its mayor. He sold the drugstore in 1934, went into the oil business, and hired the Houston architect Blum E. Hester to build him a movie palace on Main Street modelled on the Majestic in Houston. It cost eighty thousand dollars, seated 1,106, was faced in local fossilised limestone and was air conditioned, which in 1935 in Texas was most of the appeal. It opened on 26 November 1935 with a Warner Brothers picture, tickets fifty cents. It was a film house from the first night rather than a vaudeville theatre, though Hester gave it forty feet of fly space for stage work it barely used. Attendance fell away and it closed in 1967, then stood shut for more than a decade. In 1976 Frank and Hallie Crighton Guthrie gave the building away rather than sell it, to a foundation formed to save it, on condition the Crighton name stayed on it and the performing arts came first. The restoration was led by an architect named Harry Devlin and the theatre reopened in January 1979 with the Houston Symphony. It has run since on a season of plays, youth theatre and concerts. In 1999 the city rebuilt the downtown around it with new brick sidewalks and lampposts. The courthouse square it stands on is about three quarters of a mile off the interstate, which is the whole reason to take the exit.