Jefferson Theatre

The Jefferson Theatre was a product of Beaumont's second oil boom. The National Register nomination explains that the 1925 discovery of deep oil at Spindletop brought new prosperity and a wave of fine civic and cultural buildings to the city. The Jefferson Amusement Company built the theater on Fannin Street over more than ten months at a cost of about $1,000,000 and opened it in November 1927 as both a movie house and a stage for live shows. The New Orleans firm Emile Weil, Inc. designed it with a Spanish-style interior: plaster ornament, an ornate proscenium arch flanked by Spanish window balconies, a beamed ceiling, marble staircases, and about 1,800 seats on the main floor and a double balcony. Its star attraction was a Robert Morton 'wonder organ' with 778 pipes, built for the room's acoustics, that could imitate animal sounds, sirens, and cathedral chimes and rose on a disappearing platform.

Cinema Treasures gives the opening date as November 14, 1927, with Mary Astor in Rose of the Golden West. Besides films, the Jefferson presented plays and vaudeville. The City of Beaumont says it hosted a 1947 premiere of It's a Wonderful Life with James Stewart and Frank Capra in attendance. The Jefferson Amusement Company ran the theater until July 11, 1968, when it sold it to Gulf States Theatres, Inc., which closed it in October 1972.

Preservation started almost at once. Fulka Interests of Atlanta bought the building in 1974 and donated it to the LBJ Foundation, and in 1976 the foundation passed it to the Jefferson Theatre Preservation Society, organized by the Junior League of Beaumont and the Beaumont Junior Forum. The theater was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on January 30, 1978, and became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark the same year. A full restoration was completed in 2003. Conrad Schmitt Studios recreated the original stencils and decorative painting, which a later single-color paint job had covered, and the work won a 2004 Best Restoration Project Award. Today the City of Beaumont owns and operates the Jefferson for concerts, films, stage productions, and private events, and the Morton organ is still played.