The original Turnage Theatre sits empty with its walls and signature horseshoe balcony showing signs of age and deterioration.
purchased stock in The New Theatre in 1914. (He bought out his partners in 1921.) A man of obvious vision and enterprise, Turnage ended up building the ground-floor palace theater after talkies necessitated a retreat from The New Theatre’s noisy, Main Street-facing façade. Turnage outlined his history with the theater in a letter to longtime businessman and Washington Daily
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News columnist John Bragaw. The letter was published, in part, in the 1976 book “Washington and the Pamlico,” authored by part-time historians Ursula Loy and Pauline Worthy. “The New Theatre was the leading theater in Washington, N.C. from the day it opened in 1913 until 1930,” Turnage wrote. In 1929, Turnage took a long-term lease on the downstairs portion of the building and the lot behind it.