Maurin's Theater

The theater was nearly lost. Maurin's became the first air-conditioned movie house between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in 1937, and it showed its last film, Godzilla vs. Megalon, on May 27, 1979. Citizens had proposed a parish cultural center in 1974, but a 1978 referendum failed by 21 votes and a 1980 bond election lost as well. The Parish Council then voted unanimously to buy the building, and St. John Theatre opened in July 1981 with South Pacific. Board members, many from the Reserve Lions Club, took out a bank loan to finish the work.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Whitney Plantation — 5.6 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Destrehan Plantation — 14 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Laurel Valley Village — 23 mi
  A sugar plantation's workers' village south of Thibodaux, with cabins of about 1845, shotgun houses, a store and cemetery, and the 1887 strike and massacre in the parish around it.
• Tickfaw State Park — 23 mi
  A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.

More markers nearby

• Caroline Deslonde Beauregard — 0.7 mi
• Luis Bethancourt — 0.7 mi
• First Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church Sanctuary — 1.3 mi
• Historic Riverlands, 1811 Slave Revolt — 1.3 mi