Markay Theater
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
Images
The exterior of the restored Markay Theatre
The theater was restored over a period of nineteen years beginning in 1996 and now serves as a home for theatrical productions and meetings in addition to offering movies.
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
The Markay Theater was originally
built by the influential Jones family in 1930. In 1872, Welsh immigrant Thomas
T. Jones bought Globe Furnace and Fulton Furnace in Jackson and created the
Globe Iron Company. His son, Eben Jones, later became the president of Globe
Iron. Eben Jones foresaw the decline of
the iron industry in Jackson, but his son, John E. Jones bought his father's
shares of the company and innovated the production of silvery pig iron, which
completely changed and revitalized the iron industry in Jackson. John E.'s
older brother, Edwin Jones, was an industrialist and developer in Jackson. It
was Edwin Jones who built the Cambrian Hotel on the corner of Main and Broadway
Street. Edwin Jones was the father of Dwight and Donald Jones, and it was the
combination of their wives names, Marian and Kathryn, that formed the name
Markay.
The city of Jackson had the opportunity to purchase the old theater for many
years after it closed, but local leaders did not believe that this was the
best use of taxpayer funds at the time. Fortuitously, the city also did not
have the funds needed to demolish the aging building. In 1996, it was
agreed upon that the city would take ownership of the theater for the Southern
Hills Arts Council, which would then pay rent on the building amounting to one
dollar per year. The Council's obligation was to renovate, maintain, and
operate the theater. The restoration of the theater began in 1996 when the
mayor of Jackson, Tom Evans, suggested the project to the Southern Hills Arts
Council president, Maxine Plummer, and executive director, Barbra
Summers. The main reason the restoration process took nineteen years to
complete was that the funds necessary for each step of the process had to be
acquired before each phase of the restoration could begin. By the time the
restoration was completed in 2015, two million dollars had been spent on
the theater’s renovation.
In 1997, a portion of the building was opened as the Markay Cultural Arts
Center. The lobby was opened as an art and cultural gallery, and the adjacent
room that was once a small third movie theater was converted into a classroom/meeting space. The restoration of the auditorium was by far the largest
part of the restoration. First, the years of accumulated debris had to be
cleared away. A plan was then created to repair the damages caused by years of
neglect and to convert the space into a theater that could accommodate live
performances and the installation of a retractable projection screen and a
digital projector. Enormous pains were undertaken to save six bas-relief
sculptures that were part of the original theater. The panels depicted an
ironworker, a railroad man, a farmer, a miner, a woman hoeing a garden, and a
woman carrying a bushel of apples. Each panel represented a key aspect of
Jackson's development and are today the most distinctive and striking features
of the theater. The city found the panels to be so representative of Jackson's
history that replicas were placed on a recently constructed overpass above
State Route 32 in Jackson.