Lyman H. Howe (1858-1923)
Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
From headquarters in Wilkes-Barre, Howe's six touring shows introduced motion pictures to rural Americans. Pioneer exhibitor of "high class" film programs with coordinated sound. Filmed world & local events, including Pres. Theodore Roosevelt's visit here in 1905.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
From his base in Wilkes-Barre, Lyman H. Howe ran six touring companies that carried the new marvel of motion pictures to small towns and rural audiences across America. Billing his programs as "high class," he paired films with coordinated sound effects and captured world and local events alike—including President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 visit to the city. For many Americans, a Howe show was their very first movie.
Why it matters
Howe helped spread early cinema beyond the big cities, shaping how ordinary Americans first encountered the medium that would dominate 20th-century entertainment.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, the movies were brand new, and for most Americans they were still a rumor. The nickelodeons and grand picture palaces were rising in the big cities, but if you lived in a small town or out on a farm, the moving image was something you had only read about. This was the Progressive Era, a time of astonishing new machines — the automobile, the telephone, the electric light — and of a hunger to see the wider world without leaving home.
Wilkes-Barre sat in the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal country, a busy industrial city in the Wyoming Valley. It was well connected by rail, which made it a practical base from which to reach the scattered towns of the northeast. From that vantage point, one enterprising showman set out to carry the marvel of cinema to the people the big theaters would never reach.
The technology itself was still being invented in real time. Film was flammable, projectors were temperamental, and "talking pictures" as we know them were still decades away. Anyone showing films in these years was part inventor, part impresario, improvising the very idea of what a night at the movies could be.
People & events
Lyman H. Howe built his reputation not by making films but by presenting them, and by presenting them well. From his Wilkes-Barre headquarters he ran six separate touring companies at once — an ambitious operation that fanned out across the country to bring programs of motion pictures to audiences who had never seen one.
He billed his shows as "high class," and he backed the claim with craft. Where a lesser exhibitor might simply crank a reel in silence, Howe paired his films with coordinated sound effects, staging the noise of the world to match the images on the screen. For a rural audience in the early 1900s, the combined effect could be overwhelming in the best way — the closest thing to travel, spectacle, and news all at once.
Howe also turned his camera on real events, filming both distant happenings and scenes close to home. Among them was President Theodore Roosevelt's visit to Wilkes-Barre in 1905 — a moment of national attention captured and then carried, on film, to towns whose residents would otherwise only have read about it in a newspaper.
Its place in the American story
The story of American movies is usually told as a story of cities — of Hollywood, of Broadway, of the great downtown palaces. Howe's work is a reminder that cinema also had to be carried outward, town by town, before it could become the shared national language it eventually was.
For countless Americans, a traveling program like his was quite literally their first movie. That first encounter shaped expectations for everything that followed: that pictures would move, that they would be accompanied by sound, that they could show you both a president and a faraway wonder in a single sitting. The traveling exhibitor was the bridge between invention and habit.
By the time Howe's life ended in 1923, the movies had grown from a novelty into an industry on the verge of adding synchronized sound and conquering the culture. The pioneers who spread the medium beyond the cities helped make that dominance possible, seeding an audience across the whole of the country.
If you visit
The marker stands in Wilkes-Barre, in the Wyoming Valley that shaped so much of northeastern Pennsylvania's industrial history. Reading it, you're standing near the nerve center of an operation that once reached far beyond this city — six touring companies dispatched from a single town.
Let the spot reframe how you think about the movies. It's easy to picture cinema being born in a studio or a grand theater; harder, and more rewarding, to imagine it arriving in a small town by rail, unpacked into a hall, and switched on for people who had never seen a picture move.
If you're building a road trip through Pennsylvania's coal-country cities, this makes a fine, offbeat stop — a chance to trade the usual industrial story of mines and mills for one about wonder and showmanship. Take a moment to look out at the surrounding streets and imagine a 1905 crowd streaming in to see, for the very first time, the world set in motion.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Lyman H. Howe
- · Theodore Roosevelt
Themes & tags
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