Mrs. Sloan and Mr. McConahey:
Creating the Northwest's First Movie Chain

Sally Chandler, Tacoma’s future picture pioneer, was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1851. Not much is known about her early life, though she seems to have come from a family of means. As a young woman she met and married Mathew M. Sloan, in a ceremony held in Galesburg, Illinois, on September 3, 1876. Mathew was born in Cadiz, Ohio (also the hometown of Clark Gable) on June 27, 1852.^[1] As a young man he moved to Peoria, Illinois, where he worked at a dry goods firm before becoming a confectioner in St. Louis. He later returned to Peoria and joined Sloan, Johnson & Co., his brother’s wholesale grocery business. After marrying Sally Chandler in 1876, the couple settled down and had three children – two boys, Chandler and William, and a girl, Louise.

In 1882 Mathew Sloan went into the wholesale grocery business for himself, founding Hale, Sloan & Co. with partner Charles E. Hale. They were also based in Peoria, but after five years, in the summer of 1887, the partners sold the business and relocated to Tacoma, where they opened the Tacoma Grocery Company. Perhaps sensing greater opportunity in the Northwest, they were one of several wholesale grocers in the city. The Tacoma Grocery Company was capitalized to the tune of $100,000 and had ambitions of becoming the area’s largest firm; to that end they built a six-story warehouse at 2110 Pacific Avenue, a building that’s still standing more than 130 years later.^[2]

With a thriving business to support them, Mathew and Sally Sloan enjoyed all the trappings of prosperity in the early 1890s. Or they did until the Panic of 1893, which put enough strain on the Tacoma Grocery Company that the partners decided (or were forced) to sell out, turning over the business to a competitor.

But while the Tacoma Grocery Company was no more, the Sloans were far from ruined, coming away with most (if not all) of their wealth. They remained in Tacoma, with Mathew going to work for a local merchandise broker. Lifelong Unitarians, they stayed active in the church; in 1894 Mathew Sloan was a trustee for the First Free Church of Tacoma, located at Tacoma Avenue and South Third Street, in addition to being a Mason and member of the Knights Templar.^[3] Sally, on the other hand, was active in charity work and amateur theatrics, becoming a charter member of the Ladies Musical Club.

Their idyllic life changed abruptly in January 1897, however, when Mathew Sloan passed away unexpectedly at age 44. Financially Sally was secure, with enough to live on for the rest of her life. Emotionally, however, Sloan may have struggled. For years she frequently (though not always) went by the name “Mrs. Mathew M. Sloan,” and made a regular practice of donning her wedding gown on the couple’s anniversary – something she did annually until the garment no longer fit.

Mathew’s passing seems to have been the impetus that led Sally Chandler Sloan into the motion picture field. She was entering a new phase in life – one that would be recounted in several local histories, though not always factually. The oft-repeated story was that she took a portion of her money and invested it in a traveling exhibitor who was taking a Lumière cinematographé projector from town to town. Unfortunately, Sloan put her money in the wrong place; the venture went bust and the only way she could recoup her investment was to take possession of the cinematographé. So while Sally Chandler Sloan never intended to show pictures herself, circumstances forced that upon her. And in that respect she was far more successful than the man she put her money behind, taking that hand-cranked cinematographé and opening the Searchlight, Tacoma’s first moving picture theatre.^[4]

That was the legend, recounted several times over the years, sometimes with the embellishment that she ran the first permanent movie theatre in the United States. It has a modicum of truth – for the most part the story has been grossly oversimplified. But using the materials archived at the Library of Congress, plus additional documents at the University of Washington in Seattle, we can get a more accurate picture of Sally Chandler Sloan during this critical period.

What’s immediately clear from the surviving materials is that the Searchlight Theatre may have been Sloan’s claim to fame, but it also wasn’t her first rodeo. That part isn’t entirely complete – the archived Searchlight documents are like working on a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing pieces. While the overall picture is discernable, there are gaps that may well contain details crucial to understanding the entire image. Still, however, these materials tell a story, and it changes how we view Sally Chandler Sloan and her contributions to early film in the Pacific Northwest.

The starting point is the Library of Congress. Among the surviving pieces is a hand-written note detailing the cost to obtain a motion picture projector – a Lumière cinematographé, no less. The writing appears to be Sloan’s, and the note sketches a potential expenditure (interestingly, in dollars and French francs) of almost $350: a projector ($200), lantern ($26), carbons ($24), rheostat ($15) and mirror ($3). On top of this, there was an import duty ($40), plus express delivery charges from New York to Tacoma ($15). The note also lists the cost for obtaining Lumière films – $12.50 for new subjects and $7.50 for “old” (read: used) prints.

The note isn’t dated, but its existence suggests that Sally Chandler Sloan didn’t get into film exhibition because she was forced to, but because she wanted to.^[5] That note pairs with an unsigned (and perhaps unsent?) letter dated September 21, 1898, in which the operator Sloan hired to run her cinematographé projector is asking a Mr. Reed for advice on how to operate the machine. Sloan did not, in the end, purchase a brand-new Lumière cinematographé and have it shipped all the way from France. Instead, she purchased one from Reed and hired a man to run it for her; in the letter, this operator wanted Reed’s advice on how to use the machine to maximum effect.^[6]

The date of this letter comes well before the known opening of Tacoma’s Searchlight Theatre, demonstrating that Sally Chandler Sloan not only bought into the moving picture business on purpose, but did so two years earlier than previously thought. That fact is confirmed by two handbills (also called broadsides) at the Library of Congress. Most of the surviving broadsides are from a later period, clearly identifying them as Searchlight bills, but these two are different. The format is similar, but they don’t include the name of the venue because they’re not related to the Searchlight at all. Instead, they’re promoting a pair of demonstrations of “the marvelous Cinematographe [sic]” or, as the handbills advertise, “a trip around the world in ‘pictures alive.’” Tickets for these shows, designed for children, were five cents, provided attendees brought a copy of the broadside to the theatre with them. Both shows consisted of 15 short travelogue films with scenes of America, Europe, Africa and Asia, and were given on two separate Saturdays – October 30, 1898, and January 15, 1899. What’s more, the engagements were in different locations: the October show was at 67 Yates Street in Victoria, British Columbia, while the January show was at 105 South 10^th Street in Tacoma.^[7] Add to this another curiosity in the Library of Congress materials: an empty envelope, postmarked from Tacoma on October 17, 1898, and addressed to “Mrs. M.M. Sloan, Cinematograph Co., Spokane,” which pairs with a children’s ticket for the same engagement, at 505 Riverside Avenue, currently held at the Washington State History Museum.

So, already, the story of Sally Chandler Sloan’s entry into moving picture exhibition has gotten complicated. She wasn’t stuck with a Lumière cinematographé after a bad investment, but went out and purchased one herself. She then hired an operator, as demonstrated by the surviving letter to Mr. Reed, and didn’t limit her exhibitions to just Tacoma, giving shows as far away as Victoria and Spokane. And she wasn’t just bankrolling this operation – the envelope addressed to her suggests that she personally toured with the show. How Sloan became enamored with moving pictures isn’t known, but it’s clear that she was using a portion of her inheritance to set herself up as a traveling exhibitor, taking her cinematographé from city to city in the Pacific Northwest, likely renting exhibition space at each stop.

At the same time she was running this fledgling business, however, Sally Chandler Sloan was also maintaining the family home at 223 North Tacoma Avenue, where her three children (ages 13 to 22) appear to have stayed. That may have been a factor in why she seems to have abandoned life as a traveling exhibitor after only a few months. The Library of Congress materials contain a legal document – a conditional bill of sale – executed in Tacoma on December 23, 1898, between “Mrs. S.C. Sloan” and two men, Thomas Turner and Reuben Musgrave. According to this document, Turner and Musgrave agreed to purchase Sloan’s cinematographé projector along with all associated parts and equipment, which included a wide-angle “lenz,” five parlor curtains, one larger curtain, 52 Lumière films, a ticket box, megaphone and other sundry items. The agreement required Turner and Musgrave to remit $450, payable to Sloan in monthly installments of $150 beginning on January 1, 1899.^[8]

This transaction is likely the source of the “Mrs. Sloan repossesses a projector” story. The contract specifically allowed her to take the equipment back if the terms weren’t met, which included a provision that the men had to insure everything for fair market value until she was paid in full. But no one knows what happened to Turner and Musgrave’s cinematographé business. The handbill for the Tacoma show in January 1899 would have been on their watch, though it doesn’t appear their partnership lasted for long. Judging from the Tacoma city directory Ruben Musgrave, a laborer, disappeared from the city a year after the contract was signed, while Thomas Turner eventually became a boilermaker. There’s nothing to prove that Sally Chandler Sloan took her Lumière equipment back, save for the contract stipulation and the oft-told story, but that’s what seems to have transpired.

Perhaps it didn’t matter, because Sally Chandler Sloan had already embarked on a new endeavor. The next document of interest at the Library of Congress is a business card for Sloan identifying her as “Mrs. S.C. Sloan, Concert Grand.”

This would be an odd little item if it didn’t pair with another document, a letter to Sloan from William W. Ladd dated March 16, 1899. Ladd was manager of the Searchlight Advertising Company in Seattle, and was writing to inform her that a business representative from the Columbia Phonograph Company was due to arrive soon with one of their new Graphophone Grand phonographs. This unit (deemed a “concert” phonograph) had, according to Columbia, greater sound amplification than previous models – enough, they claimed, to provide a concert-like experience. “[The salesman] has with him one new model Graphophone Grand of which I was speaking when you were here,” Ladd wrote, “and to say the least, it is a marvel. Words could not express what a grand success and improvement this is over the other machines we are used to hearing.”^[9] Ladd urged Sally Chandler Sloan to visit Seattle for a private demonstration, since the machine was so exclusive that the Columbia salesman wasn’t putting it on public display. (You might ask why a salesman would lug a heavy piece of equipment all the way to the Northwest with no intention of showing it off. You could…but Sloan didn’t.)

William Ladd knew his mark. An undated handbill survives at Library of Congress announcing a “Grand Concert by the Graphaphone [sic] Grand,” a two-day (two shows per day) event. These concerts seem to have been designed as multi-aural experiences, highlighting not only the Graphophone Grand recordings but also live musical and vocal accompaniment, all presented in a chamber setting. “This is the First and Only Instrument of its kind ever brought to the State of Washington,” the announcement read, “and it will amply repay you to see this latest Edison Wonder.”^[10] (Here, once again, the Edison name was being invoked for publicity purposes. While Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, he had nothing to do with Columbia’s Graphophone Grand, which hit the market before the Edison forces released their own concert-style phonograph.)

The Library of Congress has no additional material about this Graphophone Grand engagement, but the Washington State History Museum has a ticket for the event, which was held for two days at the Donnelly Hotel in Tacoma. No dates or times are given, but the Museum dates the ticket to 1899, which would be consistent with Sloan’s purchase of the unit from the Searchlight Advertising Company. The surviving ticket is a child’s admission, and it may be that Sloan was organizing this as a children’s concert, as was also the case with her initial cinematographé shows. “Consisting of Voice Reproduction, Band, Vocal and Instrumental Music,” the ticket states, “by the only instrument of the kind ever brought to the State of Washington.”^[11]

So it seems Sally Chandler Sloan went up to Seattle for a private demonstration of the Graphophone Grand and jumped at the chance to own one; based on her initial foray into moving pictures, she was not averse to making big purchases. Once she took possession, Sloan set herself up as a concert promoter – securing a venue, organizing the musical program and, perhaps, putting her own musical skills to work in the process. One assumes from the business card and the outlay (the Graphophone Grand would have set her back about $350 in 1899, or more than $10,000 today) that this was something Sloan viewed as a new business opportunity. But other than these concerts at the Donnelly Hotel, there’s nothing to suggest that the venture went much further.

Sally Chandler Sloan was a middle-aged widow fascinated by technology, but casting about for ways in which it could be harnessed. On her own she tried both movies and music, neither of which panned out. What she needed, perhaps, was a little help from her friends.

By Eric L. Flom – January 2025

Notes:
[1] Biographical information on Mathew M. Sloan comes from Julian Hawthorne (editor), History of Washington: The Evergreen State, Volume II (New York: American Historical Publishing Co. – 1893), Pages 622-623; and Dr. T. Allen Comp (Supervisor), Tacoma: The Union Depot District, 1979 Rehabilitation Study/NPS Project Report, U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service, Pages 18-21.
[2] Water damage from a faulty sprinkler system caused part of this building to collapse in 1934. While it was eventually repaired, it was rebuilt with an Art Deco façade that obscures the structure’s true age.
[3] See The Free Church Record, Vol. II, No. 6, December 1894, Page 220.
[4] Much of what has been previously written about Sally Chandler Sloan was pulled from a profile in the Tacoma Daily Ledger, published in 1928, which set the tone for her reputation as a film pioneer. Many of those details were then picked up and repeated in multiple obituaries following her death. See Gladys Cline Wosika, “Pioneer Tacoma Woman Showed First Movies Here,” Tacoma Daily Ledger, 5 March 1928, Pages 1 and 2.; “Pioneer of Tacoma Dies,” Tacoma News Tribune, 8 February 1937, Page 12; “Mrs. Sally C. Sloan,” Tacoma Times, 8 February 1937, Page 3; “Mrs. Sloan, Film Pioneer, to be Buried,” Seattle Daily Times, 9 February 1937, Page 23; “Mrs. Sloan’s Rites Held Here Tuesday,” Tacoma Times, 9 February 1937, Page 16; and “Mrs. Sally C. Sloan Buried Monday,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10 February 1937, Page 13.
[5] Undated note (“French machine – Lumiere.”); Ernst Collection (A-0077), Library of Congress Moving Image Section, Washington, D.C.
[6] Letter from unidentified writer to “Friend Reed,” dated 21 September 1898; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[7] Moving pictures were not unfamiliar at this Yates Street location in Victoria, even before Sloan brought her traveling show there. The year before, in fact, another cinematographé exhibition was given there in October 1897. (See Paul S. Moore, “Mapping the Mass Circulation of Early Cinema: Film Debuts Coast-to-Coast in Canada in 1896 and 1897,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 21, Issue 1 [Spring 2012], Page 73.) The space continued to be used as a movie theatre even after the demise of the Searchlight, showing pictures at least until 1905, and perhaps later. (See Major J.S. Matthews, V.D.; Early Vancouver [Narrative of Pioneers of Vancouver, BC Collected Between 1931-1956, Volume 7], Vancouver Archives; http://former.vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/archives/digitized/EarlyVan/SearchEarlyVan/Vol7pdf/MatthewsEarlyVancouverVol7_ConversationWithMrMrsVanDuren.pdf, accessed 18 March 2017).
[8] Conditional Bill of Sale, 23 December 1898, filed in the Superior Court of the State of Washington for Pierce County; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[9] Letter from William Ladd to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 16 March 1899; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[10] Undated Graphophone Grand broadside; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[11] See Graphophone Grand Concert Ticket, Washington State History Museum, Catalog ID: 2004.46.2.283, Call Number: EPH/979.7780713/T349d/1899 (https://www.washingtonhistory.org/research/collection-item/?search_term=graphaphone&search_params=search_term%253Dgraphaphone&irn=100950), accessed 23 January 2021.

So Sally Chandler Sloan, the widow who bought a Lumière cinematographé and briefly became a traveling exhibitor, left the business for a new career promoting phonograph concerts. But she would get drawn back into the exhibition field a second time with the nudging of a new acquaintance, James McConahey.

Sloan’s early history is fairly well-documented; James McConahey’s, not so much. Born in Pennsylvania in 1864, by 1896 he was 32 and living in San Francisco with wife Louise and their children. McConahey was a contractor by trade, but according to a 1916 profile he was introduced to moving pictures in the Bay Area.^[1] By 1898 he had come to Seattle, and briefly operated a picture show at Second and Cherry that didn’t last long. The following year, however, he stepped in to become the new manager of the Searchlight Advertising Company – the same business where his predecessor, William W. Ladd, sold the Graphophone Grand to Sally Chandler Sloan.

The Searchlight Advertising Company was a showroom for the latest consumer goods and technology, with an emphasis on phonographs and slide projectors. (“An attractive and instructive entertainment devoted to the benefit of Advertisers,” claimed Ladd’s business card, which included the image of a stereopticon projector.^[2]) It specialized in Edison-made products, but they also sold goods from other firms, as when they (secretly) showcased Columbia’s new Graphophone Grand. Given the company’s focus on new technologies, it’s no wonder their showroom would attract someone like Sally Chandler Sloan.

James McConahey’s arrival at the Searchlight Advertising Company marked a change in business direction that better aligned it with his personal interests. It was McConahey, for example, who orchestrated a name change. At his direction, the Searchlight Advertising Company became known as the Searchlight Advertising and Amusements Company, a revised moniker that reflected an increased effort to market phonographs, advertising slides and, now, moving pictures. To that end McConahey adapted a space at 1305½ Second Avenue in Seattle as a small movie house – a way for the Searchlight to demonstrate motion picture technology for paying audiences.

When and where Mrs. Sloan met Mr. McConahey isn’t known, but it’s not hard to guess how that might have occurred. By 1899 Sloan had already dabbled in moving picture exhibition and had a prior connection to the Searchlight Advertising Company. When James McConahey took over, it put him in front and center with Sloan, an existing (and deep-pocketed) client. Once the pair met, it probably didn’t take long before their shared interest in motion pictures came up – which, in time, led to a business proposition. James McConahey was already operating the small venue on Second Avenue, which he called the Searchlight Theatre, but wanted to cast the net wider. What if they partnered to open another Searchlight location in Tacoma? And what if, to further pursue that idea, they looked at opening Searchlight theatres in other Northwest cities as well?

It was a business venture tailored to their strengths. James McConahey had the drive and the vision, but lacked the capital. Sally Chandler Sloan had money and a desire to run her own business, while also staying close to her home and family. Together, over the next two years, they partnered to create the Searchlight Theatre Circuit, operating houses in Seattle and Tacoma as well as, at various times, locations in Spokane, Victoria and Vancouver. On top of this, McConahey also organized traveling shows to play locations that couldn’t support a full-time theatre, such as North Yakima and Burnaby, British Columbia, among others.

There are no extant business records confirming a formal Sloan/McConahey partnership, but correspondence preserved at the University of Washington helps clarify their relationship. The James McConahey Papers is a collection of six letters and a few broadsides from the Searchlight Theatre Circuit.^[3] Five of the letters were written by James McConahey, with another by McConahey’s wife, all of which were addressed to Sally Chandler Sloan. It’s a small collection, but the letters vividly detail the problems they faced in running a string of turn-of-the-century movie theatres when there were few (if any) circuits like it.^[4]

The first of the bunch is a friendly letter McConahey wrote to Sloan on October 27, 1900, but it contains little more than personal information – mundane details on his recent travels and some family-related items. The second, however, dated December 7^th and addressed to “Mama,” begins with a set of instructions regarding a phonograph shipment he expressed down to Sloan at the Searchlight Theatre location in Tacoma.^[5] In addition, McConahey reported on some trouble at his own venue. Thomas Crahan, a Searchlight competitor who also sold phonographs and showed motion pictures, was warned by city police to stop blaring his phonograph into the street – classic ballyhoo advertising he used to lure passers-by into his shop. Crahan was incensed with the reprimand; why was his phonograph a distraction when James McConahey’s Searchlight, located a short distance away, was doing the same thing? He was angry and refused to comply unless the same standards were applied to the Searchlight, with McConahey admitting, privately, that Crahan had a point.^[6]

James McConahey was also grappling with a lost or misdelivered film that had been a prominent part of that week’s advertising, but now had to be substituted. This wasn’t the first time that had occurred, and such incidents were hurting business. Thus, he felt it vitally important to come down to the Tacoma location, pick up a print of Panoramic View of River Seine and personally deliver to their Searchlight Theatre location in Victoria. Then, on an unrelated note, McConahey ends this letter by asking for Sloan’s thoughts on Captain Adams’ “netatives.” (McConahey often referred to motion pictures as “netatives” in these hand-written letters.) These were films of an unknown subject taken by a Captain Adams that he was thinking of purchasing for the Searchlight Circuit. In a sign that Sally Chandler Sloan had some influence over business decisions, McConahey expressed the films down to Tacoma and wanted her opinion on whether they were worth the outlay.

The next letter, dated December 13, 1900, is from Laura McConahey; James’ typical “Dear Mama” greeting was replaced by his wife’s more reserved “Dear Friend.”^[7] James was away in Victoria (hand-delivering Panoramic View of River Seine, no doubt), so Mrs. McConahey wanted to alert Sloan to a box of films expressed to the Tacoma Searchlight, which also contained some advertising materials that could be re-used. Mrs. McConahey also mentioned that business at the Seattle location hadn’t been very good the previous two days due to poor weather.^[8]

James McConahey was back from his Victoria trip by December 19^th and picked up the correspondence once again, opening his letter of that day with the usual “Dear Mama” greeting. He started by chiding Sloan for her correspondence (none of her letters have survived), if only because she was neglecting to provide business updates on the Tacoma location – or at least she wasn’t providing the kind of detail that McConahey wanted to receive. While he was traveling Seattle authorities continued having issues with ballyhoo-style music, but this time the Searchlight was the target of their complaints. “I was order[ed] to take out phono[graph] – etc. – got permission yesterday to place it back – so had lots of trouble here in Seattle.” Recent stormy weather also caused damage to the Searchlight in Victoria. “[I] had to spend more money than I counted on – papered the store[,] it looks fine now but the storm [made] things bad – blowing at the rate of 60 miles per hour on Saturday.” He also noted that he had just sent some handbills and extra signage down to Sloan. The signs could be reused at the Tacoma location, while Sloan could take the Seattle handbills over to her printer and have similar ones made for her venue. These details – reused signage and duplicated broadsides – suggest that Searchlight movie bills originated at McConahey’s Seattle house before filtering out to other Searchlight venues as part of a weekly exhibition package.

Then, in a separate section of the letter headlined “Fire! Fire!,” the issue of Captain Adams’ “netatives” was elevated to crisis proportions. Captain Adams was, apparently, tired of having his films out on semi-permanent loan, and demanded that McConahey either return them or pay up. Which was a problem, apparently, because he had no idea where they were. “I have looked High and Low for them,” he admitted to Sloan. “As you know where they are, let me know by return mail so I can get them and return them.” This letter also contains a direct reference to Sloan’s financial role in the Searchlight Theatre Circuit, since McConahey requests a $50 dollar advance to cover ongoing business activities. Finally, in closing, he mentions that he was experimenting with shooting his own motion pictures, though his initial results were only fair.^[9]

Three days later, on December 22, 1900, McConahey was writing again with more bad news from Victoria. Now they had a personnel issue in that Andy, the house operator, had taken ill, leaving the venue without an experienced projectionist. With no one to step in, McConahey dispatched his brother Jack to Victoria as an interim solution. Jack typically ran the projector at the Seattle Searchlight, so his absence forced James McConahey to set his own work aside and run the projector while Jack was up in Victoria. Interestingly, this letter (and all the remaining letters) make no mention of Captain Adams’ “netatives.” Some way, somehow, James McConahey extricated himself from that situation.

Nearly five weeks passed before there’s another surviving letter. On January 31, 1901, McConahey wrote to “Honey” that it was cold and dreary day in Seattle, but things were looking up because Robbie was on his way out. Robbie was McConahey’s younger son and, apparently, the bane of his existence. “Rob is packing his stuff and I am going to send him out to the college where Jim was and get him out of my way…” The chaperone designated to take Robbie to school, interestingly, was Andy, the now-recovered projectionist from the Victoria house who just happened to be in Seattle that week. Talk about bad timing.

At this point Sloan and McConahey were preparing to open a new Searchlight location in Vancouver, and the letter mentions that “Billing” was hard at work on something that Andy was going to take up for the opening. (“Billing” seems to have been Millard Billings, a machinist whose shop was located near the Seattle Searchlight.) Then there was the matter of glass slides, which were projected between films at every Searchlight venue. In this case, a Mrs. Vincent approached McConahey about purchasing a set of 60 slides, but apparently Sloan was unhappy with some of her prior work. While Robbie, James McConahey’s son, couldn’t catch a break, here the sympathetic exhibitor wanted to give Mrs. Vincent a second chance, but needed Sloan to okay that decision.

The letter also notes that James McConahey’s flirtation with shooting motion pictures wasn’t a one-off occurrence. Through an associate, McConahey was considering the purchase of his own motion picture camera (along with four films taken in Nome, Alaska) for $250. “It is [a] French machine[,] nice make etc. but I hate to pay so much for it – but [it] might be cheaper in the long run than having Billing[s] make one and not to have it work…I offer[ed] him $100 cash and $50 a month for 3 months but he will take $150 and 2 months installments.” McConahey also mentioned that business had been good in Seattle over the previous weekend, and that Sloan’s Tacoma location was doing business that was roughly equal to the oft-troubled Victoria house. He closed this letter by whimsically signing it “From Peck’s Bad Kid,” a reference to the popular stage play Peck’s Bad Boy. ^[10]

James McConahey again took pencil in hand three weeks later, on February 19, 1901, a cold and snowy day in Seattle. Writing on a Tuesday, he claimed that business at his Searchlight had been “dull” that day and that there had been a drop in patronage over the previous few weeks. The same thing was happening in Victoria, where that house was having its worst period at the box office since it opened. But, on the bright side, McConahey bought the French camera and was pleased with his initial results. “Well I wish you were here with me to see the first [trial] of [the] camera,” he exclaimed. “I got [the lens] set in Saturday, focus[ed] it and [tried] it on Sunday – and Monday [got] to see what the [results were] like. Well it was a surprise for everybody – Parker the Photo Supply man says “Mac, you are all right…” McConahey was so excited with this camera test that he took the footage over to his competitor, Thomas Crahan, for a second opinion. (“[I]t was alright…,” Crahan sniffed.) McConahey continued: “[T]he netatives [sic] and the positives cost me $80 [to make,] and I am anxious to make some pictures to get the price back in my pocket,” noting that he was headed up to Canada and planned to bring the camera with him. He then ended the letter with post-script, announcing that his brother Jack took in $53 from a special one-night engagement in North Yakima – impressive, considering the Seattle house only took in $47 the previous Saturday night. He also mentioned a special giveaway contest that Sloan was organizing at the Tacoma Searchlight in which the winner would receive a writing desk valued at $17.50.^[11]

The final document in the James McConahey Papers is a handwritten letter to Sloan dated March 13, 1901, which McConahey scribbled on Searchlight letterhead. The stationary is interesting – the company logo is a variant of the graphic used on William Ladd’s business card when he was with the company. It also identifies four “parlors” on the Searchlight Circuit, with houses in located Seattle, Tacoma, Victoria and Vancouver (no mention of the Spokane location). But James McConahey was now part of the logo himself, with a handsome likeness in the upper left-hand corner. Sally Chandler Sloan may have been a financial partner in the Searchlight Theatre Circuit, but the stationary conveys that he, and not Sloan, was heading the business.

The good news in this letter was that McConahey closed a deal for pictures of Queen Victoria’s funeral (she passed away 10 weeks earlier), with a 500-foot subject due to arrive within days.^[12] The bad news was that there was yet another incident at the Victoria house; it’s not clear what occurred, but Andy the projectionist was involved and McConahey had to intervene. So that issue, coupled with the Queen Victoria pictures, was going to take him up to British Columbia for a bit. “So I think the Best thing for me to do is to take the pictures now at Victoria and the Queen Funeral [films] to [the] showing at Nanaimo,” he concluded, referencing part of a Canadian tour he was organizing for the Queen Victoria films. “It will be the best way to get my money back…before somebody else gets ahead of me [on the touring circuit].” In this final letter, McConahey ended by hoping that business at the Tacoma Searchlight was better than it was in Seattle, where it had been slow for several weeks.

Unfortunately, the business didn’t recover. We don’t know exactly how much longer each Searchlight location continued to operate, but the Tacoma venue was struggling by early 1902. Sally Chandler Sloan’s account book, at the Library of Congress, shows that there was an extended downturn at the box office, though perhaps not so large as to be alarming. But she stopped entering her daily box office receipts at the beginning of June, tallying expenses for a short while longer. The end of her Searchlight location seems to have been abrupt. On May 19, 1902, Sloan paid $20 to renew her business license with the city of Tacoma, yet the theatre seems to have closed within weeks. The renewal suggests that although business had slowed, she and McConahey were continuing to push forward, looking for ways to boost ticket sales. Ultimately, it’s a riddle they failed to solve.

By Eric L. Flom – January 2025

Notes:
[1] See “A Veteran Picture Man,” Moving Picture World, 4 March 1916, Page 1519.
[2] See William W. Ladd’s business card, Searchlight Advertising Company; Ernst Collection (A-0077), Library of Congress.
[3] The James McConahey Papers, like the Searchlight materials at the Library of Congress, were saved by Sally Chandler Sloan’s daughter Louise Ernst. In 1956 she was interviewed by journalist Lucile McDonald of the Seattle Times, who often wrote about aspects of local history. During that meeting, Ernst gave McDonald some handbills from the old Searchlight Theatre Circuit, ones that are identical to those found at the Library of Congress. McDonald tucked those away and only brought them out again five years later, when Helene Herrold of Poulsbo sent her the McConahey letters, written to Sally Chandler Sloan in 1900 and 1901. Herrold was given the letters by Ernst, a librarian in rural Pierce County who was then in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s. The letters, she thought, might make an interesting article on early movies in Seattle, as written from the exhibitor’s point of view. She was right – they were the makings of an interesting article, except that it took McDonald four more years to write it up. (See letter from Helene Herrold to Lucile McDonald, dated 15 February 1961, and letter from Lucile McDonald to Louise Sloan Ernst, dated 21 February 1961, James McConahey Papers [0546-001], University of Washington Special Collections, Seattle; and Lucile McDonald, “Seattle’s First Movies Really Flickered,” Seattle Times, 28 March 1965, Charmed Land Magazine, Page 2.) Eventually Lucile McDonald donated her own papers to the Special Collections Division at the University of Washington, which included the McConahey materials. Those were eventually split into an entirely separate collection.
[4] See the James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[5] Letter from James McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 7 December 1900; James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[6] Thomas Crahan was no ordinary competitor – in fact, he had more industry experience than James McConahey. In his 1991 book Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, Charles Musser notes that a year earlier, in 1899, Crahan (hailing from Montana) formed the Klondike Exposition Company, partnering with the Edison Manufacturing Company to shoot a series of films in Alaska. Crahan and an Edison cameraman, Robert K. Bonine, went northward in mid-1899 and shot several films, a few of which survive, but the pair was generally unhappy with how the pictures turned out. All Thomas Crahan was able to salvage from the project were some illustrated lectures he presented under the title Artistic Glimpses of the Wonder World. (See Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company [Berkeley: University of California Press – 1991], Pages 144-145.)
[7] Throughout the James McConahey letters, McConahey alternates using “Laura” and “Louise” when referring to his wife.
[8] Letter from Laura McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, 13 December 1900; James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[9] Letter from James McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 19 December 1900; James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[10] Letter from James McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 31 January 1901; James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[11] Letter from James McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 19 February 1901; James McConahey Papers, University of Washington.
[12] James McConahey printed a special program for his Queen Victoria funeral pictures indicating that the 500 feet of film mentioned in his March 13, 1901, letter wasn’t the entirely of his show. The Queen Victoria film showed the funeral cortege passing through Windsor and arriving at Trinity Pier, and included a second film showing King Edward VII leaving Buckingham Palace to attend the service. Several other pictures filled out the bill, a few of them previously shown at Searchlight venues in the Northwest. Prices were advanced for this special engagement – 25 cents for adults, 10 cents for children. (McConahey printed a similar program later in 1901 for a special set of films curated around the assassination of President William McKinley.)

Although the Searchlight Theatre Circuit was a short-lived venture, the materials at the Library of Congress and University of Washington tell us a lot about how these early movie theatres operated.

On the organizational side, the surviving handbills, which turn up in both collections, make clear that each of the Searchlight houses operated under roughly the same policies. The parlors in Seattle (1305½ Second Avenue), Tacoma (744 Pacific Avenue) and Spokane (827 Riverside Avenue) each had two daily sessions, one in the afternoon (1-5 p.m.), followed by a second in the evening (6:30-10 p.m.), though hours varied slightly over time and between locations. Admission was 10 cents for adults and five for children, and shows ran continuously, so patrons could enter or exit whenever they chose.

From the handbills we can tell that the picture offerings were, by and large, Edison films, though that wasn’t always the case. At this time, around the turn of the century, the film industry didn’t yet have a rental distribution structure supporting exhibitors of this type, forcing the Searchlight Circuit to purchase their movies outright. James McConahey appears to have made most of these decisions, and he leaned toward Edison releases – which makes sense, given the Searchlight showroom featured mostly Edison products. But the surviving correspondence demonstrates that Sally Chandler Sloan was consulted on at least some content matters, such as Captain Adams’ “netatives” and the glass slides peddled by Mrs. Vincent. And there’s at least one undated broadside, from the Searchlight in Tacoma, proving that James McConahey began creating his own content with his French camera – panoramic views of the Seattle waterfront he took from the deck of the West Seattle ferry.^[1]

Most of the Searchlight films were documentary in nature – scenics or pictures of topical/historical events, including themed programs built around Spanish American War, the assassination of President William McKinley, the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Galveston hurricane and flood. Others were short comic scenes or films of variety performers, such as the Craig family of acrobats, an oft-repeated screening along the Searchlight Circuit. Narrative films were only just becoming popular, so they’re underrepresented on the surviving broadsides. Still, the Circuit had copies of The Astronomer’s Dream (1898), Cinderella (1899) and Little Red Riding Hood (1901), all of which were Georges Méliès films. (Although their copy of Little Red Riding Hood may have been the version that was duped and redistributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company.)

E.B. Swanson grew up in Tacoma and, in 1959, recalled the atmosphere of the Searchlight. “The ‘Searchlight Theater’…is where I saw my first motion picture,” Swanson remembered. “It was a few doors away from the Donnelly Hotel, in the direction of City Hall. As I recall, it was a large, bare, room, opening directly off from Pacific, with straight-backed wooden chairs set in even rows and a white screen against the back wall. It could have been a converted store, although it seems to me that the entrance was from a door off a short hallway, rather than directly from the street.”^[2] The other Searchlight locations probably fell in line with Swanson’s memories of the Tacoma venue – in other words, for whatever exterior flourish they may have had from the street, the interiors were bare and nondescript.

James McConahey’s Seattle house was the center of the Searchlight universe, where new pictures played first and where he orchestrated the shipment of film and advertising materials between houses. McConahey was the head of the organization and provided the overall business vision. This included expansion into other Northwest cities and arranging special film tours, such as the roadshow he put together for the Queen Victoria funeral pictures, though he appears to have consulted with Sally Chandler Sloan when making at least some of these decisions.^[3] McConahey balanced Circuit business with his duties in the Searchlight showroom, though he was also a skilled operator who could perform the task whenever his brother Jack could not. This was a beneficial arrangement in that it gave McConahey the flexibility to dispatch himself or his brother to a different house or to manage a touring show, which could be done without taking on the cost of hiring an extra person.

In contrast, down in Tacoma Sally Chandler Sloan played the role of manager, overseeing day-to-day operations. She also greeted patrons and operated the Graphophone Grand concert player (which remained in her possession), the horn jutting from an upper window so that the music could be heard by passers-by. She may have known a bit about projection, but usually hired someone to do that for her. On the business side her primary role was financial, though James McConahey occasionally sought her opinion on business matters, something he doesn’t appear to have done with other Searchlight managers.

Sloan failed to keep detailed records for the first few weeks that the Tacoma Searchlight was in operation, so it’s hard to know how the venue was initially received. It appears to have opened in October 1900, but she didn’t bother to document the first week’s box office take. Then, for the next 19 weeks, Sloan only recorded the weekly box office amount, without indicating daily totals or what films were showing. That changed in April 1901 when she stepped up her game, perhaps at McConahey’s behest – now she was capturing the daily box office take, split out by afternoon and evening sessions. She also began listing the film she considered to be the house’s “feature” attraction, and began documenting business expenses, which she didn’t do at all during the venue’s first five months.

Take June 1901 as an example. The featured attraction for the first week, scrawled in the margin of Sloan’s account book, were scenes of the hurricane destruction in Galveston, which occurred nine months previous. The following week was a return engagement of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, which was also the feature attraction during the last week of May. But it drew well, with both engagements becoming the month’s top attraction. (The picture would be shown at the Tacoma Searchlight again in November, and it was that month’s biggest moneymaker as well – but just barely.) The third week of June featured pictures from a reception honoring Admiral George Dewey, famous for leading America to victory in the Battle of Manila Bay three years earlier. In the final week of June the Searchlight showed pictures of fighting in the Philippines, though it’s not clear whether these films were from the Spanish American War or whether they merely showed the hostilities that continued all the way into 1902. All told, the Tacoma Searchlight took in $343.80 during June 1901 – the best week featuring the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight ($90.80) and worst featuring the pictures of Admiral Dewey ($60.15).

On the expense side Sally Chandler Sloan spent at least $269.00 that month, leaving her $74.80 in the black. The largest single expense, $61.30, was for staffing, which was paid to “Richards” – this was Paul L. Richards, the house projectionist. While the operator was generally the highest-paid employee behind the manager, in this case he may have also handled payroll duties (though the Searchlight had few actual employees). Richards eventually left the Searchlight to work for a local photography company, after which Sloan began marking comparable expenses as “wages.”

The next highest expense was rent, which ran the Searchlight $60 per month. Miscellaneous business expenses stood at $54.30, but that included a $50.20 advance made to James McConahey, plus a $2 round trip that Sloan made to visit the Searchlight location in Seattle. Equipment and repairs came to $52.55, which included materials and the occasional handyman to do work on the Searchlight space. Sloan spent $39.55 on advertising, which included the tickets and broadsides she printed each week, plus any signage she wasn’t already getting from the Seattle house. She paid to be listed in a few local directories, but there were no entries for newspaper advertising in June 1901. The rest of the house expenses were small – $0.85 for stamps and glue, plus another $0.45 for extra help, most likely the boys Sloan hired to run errands or distribute handbills.

As Charles Musser observed, Sally Chandler Sloan’s account book is a rare and valuable artifact that shines a light on the inner workings of a turn-of-the-century movie theatre. There’s no disputing that. But Sloan wasn’t a trained bookkeeper, and it showed. In the sample month of June 1901, for example, there are no expenses for express shipments, even though the McConahey letters make clear that materials were regularly shuttled between Searchlight locations. And when you look at her expenses in total, weeks would go by without an entry for salaries, let alone the fact that (if you took her accounting literally) Sloan neglected to pay rent about quarter of the time.^[4]

Then, of course, there’s the curious fact that her tally of box office receipts ends abruptly on June 1, 1902, but her expense log kept going, ending with an advertising expense she paid on June 7^th. It’s not clear whether Sloan stopped keeping detailed records, whether she began tallying her income and expenses elsewhere or (as seems the case) the Searchlight closed abruptly sometime in June. We also don’t know whether the Tacoma location closed before or after any of the others, or whether the entire Circuit shut down at once. The Seattle house, at least, appears to have closed around the same time, so it’s possible that the entire business collapsed in the summer of 1902, bringing everything to an abrupt halt.

In the end, the demise of the Searchlight Theatre Circuit was likely a combination of several factors. They were early to the storefront theatre game, for one, the public hadn’t yet embraced movies as a form of everyday entertainment, and film production and distribution hadn’t matured to the point where exhibitors like Sloan and McConahey could change bills cheaply or frequently. While the Tacoma house was located near the Davenport Hotel, allowing it to attract both guests and locals, that factor alone didn’t guarantee a steady stream of patrons. The Seattle location appears to have done relatively well, but the McConahey letters suggest that the wet and cold Northwest weather impacted box-office returns. The Victoria house was problematic all around, while the Vancouver house is only mentioned in passing in the McConahey letters, so it’s difficult to determine how successful that location might have been. It may be, too, that James McConahey’s expansion plans were simply too ambitious and too costly. He was attempting to manage several houses across geographies, before there was an established audience for his product, and in an industry that wasn’t yet structured in a way that supported his operation. Given those factors, the fact that Sloan and McConahey kept the Searchlight Theatre Circuit afloat for almost two years is remarkable by itself.

So the Searchlight Circuit was a failure, but an important one in that it left behind a record of how it operated at a particular moment in time. For Charles Musser, Sally Chandler Sloan’s account book demonstrates the difficulty of being a pioneer. In his read of the Searchlight’s box office receipts, the venue had a short honeymoon but eventually ran into difficulties when it couldn’t maintain a steady audience. The decline in patronage began slowly, within a year of opening, and continued through the fall as the Searchlight offered special programs around the death of President William McKinley. Their difficulty in obtaining new subjects (or, at least, the right new subjects) was evident, with frequent repeat screenings of the films in their possession, no doubt contributing to the drop in patronage. That, along with decreasing audience interest once movies were no longer viewed as a novelty, plus competition from other forms of popular entertainment, all lead Musser to conclude that operations like the Searchlight struggled mightily. “Storefront theaters like [the Searchlight] proved to be an exhibition form of limited viability in the early 1900s.”^[5]

The Searchlight Theatre Circuit was a short-lived venture, but it nonetheless pioneered, in the Northwest, the idea that a moving picture show could be a permanent community fixture. Film exhibitions to that point had only been temporary – shows that rolled into town for a night or two, or perhaps for a couple of weeks in a rented location, before pulling up stakes. The idea that a film was, by itself, enough of a draw that an exhibitor could set up permanently was a new concept – and one that was, apparently, ahead of its time. The irony, of course, was that the Searchlight venues in Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane were a bust, but within five or six years those same cities would have multiple nickelodeons lining their streets – profitable little movie houses that had the good fortune of operating in a better business environment. “…[W]e can learn a great deal about the beginnings of the motion picture industry through this initial set of failures,” Douglas Gomery observed of enterprises like the Searchlight. “We must set aside the myth that Americans intently embraced the movie show.”^[6]

By Eric L. Flom – January 2025

Notes:
[1] See undated broadside, Searchlight Theatre (Tacoma, WA); Ernst Collection (A-0077), Library of Congress. Though undated, given the listing of films this notice probably dates from 1901.
[2] Letter from E.B. Swanson to Emily Walker, dated 22 April 1959; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[3] James McConahey didn’t limit his Queen Victoria roadshow to Canada, taking it to larger venues in western Washington as well. One of those shows took place at Everett’s Central Opera House in April 1901, in a program that also included some travelogue selections and, inexplicably, footage of a diving horse attraction at Coney Island and a cigar-smoking baby. This engagement constituted the first known film presentation in Everett. See David Dilgard, Mill Town Footlights (Everett, Wash.: Everett Public Library – 2001), Page 83.
[4] All box office receipt and expense information comes from the Searchlight Theatre Account Booklet; Ernst Collection, Library of Congress.
[5] Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkley, California: University of California Press—1993), Pages 297, 299 and 303.
[6] Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press – 1992), Page 3.

For James McConahey the demise of the Searchlight Theatre Circuit was a disappointment, but not one that dampened his enthusiasm for motion pictures. He continued calling Seattle home for a spell, but eventually left to become a traveling exhibitor, moving up and down the West Coast and reportedly giving shows as far east as the Mississippi River.^[1]

His time on the road didn’t last long. Within a few years McConahey resettled in Spokane, where he ran a photography and postcard studio while dabbling in motion pictures on the side. In 1908 he was elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Spokane operator’s union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), Local 9.^[2] In 1910 he became the projectionist at Spokane’s Orpheum Theatre, and two years later was performing those same duties over at the Arcade. But it was only a matter of time before James McConahey went back into management. At some point in 1912 he picked up the lease of a small picture house, refurbished the space and opened it as the Best Theatre.^[3] It took a while, but McConahey was back in business, operating as a full-time exhibitor and supplementing shows with films of his own creation.

By 1914 McConahey was in expansion mode. Not only was he running the Best Theatre but was also managing a second venue in Spokane, the American. At the same time, he was using his camera experience to secure commercial film work. In August 1914 he was hired by a pair of local entrepreneurs to document an improved method of delivering mail bags to moving trains. James McConahey devised, shot and edited this film, which showed a locomotive passing through the Parkwater Depot at 30 miles per hour, “the new device picking up mail bags containing a live dog, pigeons and fresh eggs, without injury.”^[4] Shortly thereafter he thrilled patrons at the American by lugging his camera to the top of the Bell Telephone building in Spokane, giving them a birds-eye view of the city, and followed that up by filming scenes at a local baseball game. He also took an active role in community events, such as when he organized a four-day screening of Joan of Arc to benefit the Christmas fund of the Catholic Social Betterment League.^[5]

Despite his reemergence in Northwest film circles, however, a string of bad luck in 1917 pushed James McConahey out of exhibition for good. That spring he was forced to close the Best Theatre when the property owners sold the building, which was eventually razed for what would become the Crescent Department Store. Having disposed of the American a short time before, this briefly left James McConahey without a house, though in July he took over the Strand Theatre, a venue that had been closed for more than a year. Located at 809 W. First Avenue, the Strand (opened at the turn of the century as the elegant Spokane Theatre) wouldn’t be around long enough for McConahey to get established. Barely four months into his tenure, on the evening of December 7, 1917, the space was gutted by a spectacular nighttime fire.^[6] After McConahey closed for the day, the blaze ignited in a storage area beneath the projection room and raged for 90 minutes before it was extinguished. The damage was thorough; in a sign of the times, a photograph in The Spokesman-Review showed the Strand’s charred remains under the heading “Burned Strand Theater Resembles Work of Huns.” Thankfully the Palmerton Hotel, located next to the Strand and filled with guests at the time, suffered only light damage as the firewall constructed between the hotel and the theatre held strong.

James McConahey was only leasing the Strand but estimated his personal loss at $1,500, which included the house piano, screen, some scenery and lighting fixtures. He was bitter about this misfortune – in 1917 he sold one house, lost two others and had personal property destroyed in the Strand fire, which doesn’t appear to have been insured. He told The Spokesman-Review that he was unlikely to exhibit motion pictures ever again, and would only reconsider if the available house underwent a “radical remodel” before he stepped in.

McConahey was angry, but also a man of his word. After the 1917 fire he briefly slipped back into his role as a moving picture operator before leaving Spokane for Los Angeles, where he worked as a freelance cameraman. He didn’t work in the movie industry, per se, but engaged in the type of commercial filming work that occupied some of his time in Spokane. He continued living in the Los Angeles area until his death on June 17, 1944.

Sally Chandler Sloan, meanwhile, had the luxury of returning to life as a moderately well-to-do widow. Although she appears to have bankrolled at least part of the Searchlight operation, Sloan once again emerged with her finances largely intact, much like she and Mathew had following the demise of the Tacoma Grocery Company. But she never returned to field of entertainment, save for the music and amateur theatrics that had always been her passion. She may have worked off and on during these later these years, but generally lived a comfortable, though modest life, presumably on the money she inherited following Mathew’s death. But Sloan did, eventually, remarry – on February 20, 1904, “Mrs. S.C. Sloan” wed John Runnin in Tacoma.^[7] If there’s any real mystery about Sally Chandler Sloan, this would be it. A search of Ancestry.com shows that Runnin is somewhat of a blank slate, and other than a marriage certificate there’s little known about him, how long this marriage may have lasted, or how it ended. To be sure, though, if there was ever a Sally Chandler Runnin, she wasn’t known that way for very long.

This marriage – whatever transpired – may partially explain why Sloan didn’t stay in Tacoma. Whether by accident or design, she relocated to Spokane around 1905, where James McConahey would also come to live. The pair remained friendly; in fact, when McConahey was elected to his IATSE leadership post in 1908, the same group chose William G. Sloan, her youngest son, to be Local 9’s Sergeant-at-Arms. Way back in 1901, in one of James McConahey’s letters, he wrote that William (age 21 at the time) had already shown an interest in moving picture projection. “I hope William will take to the picture business,” McConahey wrote, “…he need not be afraid of the Electricity.”^[8] William G. Sloan must have overcome that fear, spending much of his career as a projectionist in Spokane and Tacoma.

Sloan remained active in the church while in Spokane. In 1909 “Mrs. M.M. Sloan” was elected President of the Women’s Alliance at the First Unitarian Church, heading a group of 35 members.^[9] She generally kept a low profile, though she turned up in the papers in November 1911 when she was injured in a train derailment in central Washington.^[10]

By the early 1920s, however, after 15-plus years in Spokane, Sally Chandler Sloan returned to Tacoma, where she remained until her death on February 6, 1937, at the age of 86. It was during these years that she began to be recognized as a Tacoma pioneer. Already Sloan was regarded as the city’s first motion picture exhibitor, which wasn’t entirely true but was, for many journalists, close enough. She was also noted for her collection of period gowns. Sloan had been quite the fashionista as a young socialite, during her marriage to Mathew, and held on to many of her favorite pieces. This included her original wedding gown and the outfit she wore to the opening of the Tacoma Theatre in 1890, among many others.^[11] For Sloan these weren’t just keepsakes – she loaned them out for local theatrical productions, and still hadn’t given up wearing them on occasion. In late 1932 she donned one to attend a Drama League production, catching the eye of Gladys M. Tucker of the Tacoma Daily Ledger, who was also in attendance. “‘These old-fashioned dresses with the bustles are certainly beautiful,” the 81-year-old admitted, “but a nuisance to wear when you’re driving a car!’”

The encounter prompted Tucker to seek an interview with Sloan, where the two dug into her collection.^[12] The dress she wore at the opening of the Tacoma Theatre, for example, reminded Sloan of how she and Mathew sat in box seats to watch the comic opera Paolo; Mathew had outbid other Tacoma elites for the tickets. She also brought out her 1874 wedding dress, along with the shoes she wore and the gloves she had made at a specialty shop in New York City. Sloan also modeled the coat she was wearing on the day, in 1887, when she first set foot in Tacoma. Not all her clothing had a sentimental attachment, however. One piece she no longer owned was a dress that, she recalled, would look great with a scarlet turban, all the rage at the time. Sloan went to a Tacoma milliner to have one made, then excitedly modeled the outfit for her children once it was delivered. But they burst out laughing, since the pattern of the dress trim looked like tiny rows of peppers. She should send the turban back, her children said, and ask the milliner to instead make her a tomato and head of lettuce – that way she’d look like a walking salad.

Gladys M. Tucker described Sloan as being “not as active as she was, being over 80 years of age, but [having] a beautiful crown of snow white hair, eyes as young or old as she pleases and a complexion any girl might envy.” Only briefly did they discuss her role in Tacoma movie history. “…Mrs. Sloan was 50 years ahead of her time because she had the first moving picture show in Tacoma in 1899. The other day, Mrs. Sloan says, she met a young man who, as a red-cheeked little boy she often ‘passed into’ the shows. Homer Bone, recently elected United States Senator, was the man and he hadn’t forgotten the ‘comps’ either.”^[13]

Sally Chandler Sloan’s place in local history was set, however, with an article that appeared on the front page of the Tacoma Daily Ledger in 1928. There she was lauded as not only as the owner of the first moving picture show in Tacoma but the second ever in the entire country – the Searchlight Theatre in Seattle being the first.^[14] The article was wrong on both counts, but Sally Chandler Sloan was happy to bask in the spotlight and, apparently, not that eager to correct the record.

Penned by Gladys Cline Wosika, this 1928 article captured Sloan’s own memories of Tacoma’s Searchlight Theatre, played up her role as one of the country’s first motion picture exhibitors and even briefly mentioned an associate – a “Mr. McConahae.” For Wosika, Sloan was a local legend. “…[Old-time] Tacomans will no doubt also remember Mrs. Sloan, America’s pioneer motion picture theater owner, as the smiling lady with the silver lorgnette who placed the phonograph records on the [G]raphophone [G]rand talking machine that stood in the entrance of the theater and which blared, through a brass horn five feet high, patriotic marches, waltz and two-step airs and vocal music to the passerby.”^[15] Sloan’s version of the Searchlight Theatre Circuit, as relayed to Wosika, went this way: some 30 years previous, she and James McConahey first opened the Searchlight in Seattle, then went on to establish the Tacoma parlor, with houses in Spokane, Victoria and Vancouver opening shortly thereafter. At the Tacoma location, Sloan had about 25 feet of frontage along Pacific Avenue. “From the outside entrance the Graphophone-Grand talking machine which costs $350, and was one of three in the state of Washington, furnished the music except when the piano was played for the singer of the illustrated song, which was a feature of the program. The moving picture operator, the girl who took the entrance fee (there were no tickets), a boy who distributed handbills and Mrs. Sloan, who had charge of the talking machine…were the working force of the theater. There were no usherettes, each person was expected to find a seat unaided…and the interior of the theater was as black as the proverbial ace of spades.”^[16]

From there, however, Mrs. Sloan (age 76 at the time) may have merged stories. She told Wosika that the Searchlight used a hand-cranked cinematographé projector, though she may have been recalling her days as a traveling exhibitor. To her recollection, it took her and McConahey a full year before they could switch out her cinematographé projector for a newer Edison model. She also grossly inflated the price of film ($12.50 for new Lumière prints, according to the hand-written note at the Library of Congress) to $350 to $500 apiece, adding that they could only be purchased from France.

Some of Sally Chandler Sloan’s memories in 1928 may have conflicted with the historical record, but she was nonetheless revered not just as a movie pioneer, but as a warm and generous spirit in the community. “Many Tacomans who were children when Tacoma’s first movie was showing on Pacific Avenue are among the hundreds of children that saw with amazed and wide open eyes their very first movie through the generosity of Mrs. Sloan. Because of her interest in the pleasure of children, every Saturday and school vacation day Mrs. Sloan admitted a score of more of Tacoma children who otherwise would have been unable to attend…free of charge.”^[17]

Free of charge. Sally Chandler Sloan not only appears to have bankrolled the Searchlight Theatre Circuit but, quite possibly, managed to bankrupt it as well.

By Eric L. Flom – January 2025

Notes:
[1] “A Veteran Picture Man,” Moving Picture World, 4 March 1916, Page 1519.
[2] “Operators’ Union in Spokane, Wash.,” Moving Picture World, 23 May 1908, Page 457.
[3] “A Veteran Picture Man,” Moving Picture World, 4 March 1916, Page 1519.
[4] See “American,” The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), 30 August 1914, Part 4, Page 2; and “Local Films at American Liked,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 1 September 1914, Page 8.
[5] See “In the Northwest,” Moving Picture World, 17 October 1914, Page 382; In the Northwest,” Moving Picture World, 21 November 1914, Page 1102; and “In the Northwest,” Moving Picture World, 5 December 1914, Page 1405.
[6] See “Flames Destroy Strand Theater; Was Noted Spokane Playhouse,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, 8 December 1917, Pages 1 and 2; “Flames Gut Old Spokane Theater, The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), 9 December 1917, Page 8; and S. Clark Patchin, “James McConahey Again Without a Theater,” Moving Picture World, 5 January 1918, Page 128.
[7] See “Marriage Certificate No. 2167, dated 20 February 1904, Pierce County, Washington – Washington, U.S., Marriage Records, 1854-2013,” Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/1260505:2378?tid=&pid=&queryId=508602ca4e1101715fc86eb473674430&_phsrc=lIU110&_phstart=successSource), accessed 27 November 2022.
[8] Letter from James McConahey to Mrs. S.C. Sloan, dated 10 March 1901; James McConahey Papers (0546-001), University of Washington.
[9] See The Pacific Unitarian (San Francisco: Pacific Unitarian Conference), November 1909, Pages 251-252; and National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women (New York: The Knickerbocker Press—1910), Page 144.
[10] See “Eleven Hurt in Wreck,” The Daily Capital Journal (Salem, Oregon), 28 November 1911, Page 1; and “Express Train in the Ditch,” La Grande Evening Observer (La Grande, Oregon), 28 November 1911, Page 1.
[11] See “Pioneer of Tacoma Dies,” Tacoma News Tribune, 6 February 1937, Page 12.
[12] Gladys M. Tucker, “Prizes Old Gowns,” Tacoma Daily Ledger, 8 January 1933, Pages C1 and C6.
[13] Ibid., Page C6.
[14] Gladys Cline Wosika, “Pioneer Tacoma Woman Showed First Movies Here,” Tacoma Daily Ledger, 5 March 1928, Pages 1-2.
[15] Ibid., Page 1.
[16] Ibid., Page 2. The reference to the illustrated song is interesting. It would not have been that unusual for the Searchlight Circuit to have used them, particularly to fill time as new film subjects were spooled into the projector. However, none of the surviving broadsides (covering mostly the Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane locations) mention illustrated songs as part of the shows.
          In addition, the reference to the fact that “there were no tickets” isn’t exactly true – there’s a surviving ticket in the Library of Congress materials. It may be that tickets were not a regular feature, but that they were printed only for special shows – in this case, the surviving stub is from a program built around the 1900 Galveston tragedy.
[17] Ibid.