The Fountain Theatre: A stage for every generation

Editor’s Note: The information for this story comes from a number of sources provided by the Mesilla Valley Film Society which currently operates the Fountain Theatre.

There were no multiplexes nor talking pictures, and it was long before streaming services, as people gathered inside a modest adobe building on Mesilla's plaza to laugh, applaud and lose themselves in stories.

The entertainment looked different then. Sometimes it was a live play or a vaudeville act. There were lantern-slide presentations that transported audiences to places they would never visit themselves. When motion pictures arrived, there was no permanent screen, no sound system and no guarantee the projector would make it through the evening. But none of that seemed to matter.

For more than 120 years, the Fountain Theatre has survived because it has never stopped doing the same thing: bringing people together.

The theater's roots stretch beyond even the day it opened as an entertainment venue. The oldest portion of the building, its front wall, dates to the 1870s, when the property occupied the site of Confederate barracks in Mesilla.

In 1905, Albert Fountain Jr., son of the legendary Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, purchased the building and transformed it into what would become one of Southern New Mexico's most enduring cultural landmarks. For the Fountain family, theater wasn't simply a business. It was part of their identity.

Albert Jr.'s father, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, is remembered today as the attorney, newspaper publisher and politician whose mysterious disappearance with his young son Henry in 1896 became one of New Mexico's greatest unsolved mysteries. But there was another side to him that is often overlooked.

Contemporary accounts praised his dramatic courtroom presence, describing him as possessing remarkable theatrical ability. His younger brother, Edward Jennings, was among the country's best-known Shakespearean actors, and in 1874 the Colonel founded the Mesilla Dramatic Association. Together with Albert Jr., he converted a building on the northwest corner of the plaza into the Mesilla Valley Opera House, where local residents performed plays and family productions.

Albert Jr. grew up backstage, painting scenery and creating stage sets beside his father. So, when he purchased the theater in 1905, continuing that tradition seemed inevitable.

The building quickly became the valley's entertainment center. Around 1912, the theater that had thrived with live performances embraced another innovation as Albert Jr. adapted it for motion pictures. Silent films, however, were anything but silent.

Albert Jr., his wife and daughters supplied live musical accompaniment for every screening. Because the films arrived with English intertitles while most local audiences spoke Spanish, Albert translated every title card aloud.

According to patrons who remembered attending as children, he rarely stopped there, adding his own commentary, jokes and observations as the story unfolded. His son Henry operated the projector, but there was no projection booth, no permanent screen and the temperamental machine frequently failed. Whenever it did, the family musicians simply kept the audience entertained until the film began again.

Entertainment, after all, was never just what happened on the screen.

The family's talents extended well beyond movies. During World War I, Tillie Fountain Ruiz directed productions in the theater and performed as part of the Fountain Quartette, a family ensemble known for its music and dancing. The group even traveled by Santa Fe Railroad to Chicago to entertain at railroad conventions. According to family history, Tillie also introduced audiences in Mesilla to the Olvera Brothers of Chiapas, Mexico, bringing marimba music to the Fountain stage.

The building itself tells those stories. Beginning in either 1914 or 1917, Albert Jr. painted the murals that still decorate the theater today, completing them in 1924. One depicts his father entering the Mesilla Valley; another portrays Mesilla as it appeared in 1913. More than decoration, they serve as a family scrapbook painted across the theater walls. The murals were refreshed during the 1950s and carefully restored again in 2015.

The theater continued evolving as entertainment changed. In 1929, new owner Vicente Guerra wired the building for sound, installed projection equipment, permanent seating and a fixed screen, allowing audiences to experience the new era of talking pictures. When Albert Fountain III repurchased the building following foreclosure in 1938, he emphasized Spanish-language films while continuing occasional live performances, preserving the theater's close connection to Mesilla's predominantly Hispanic community.

Even after movies faded from the building, the curtain never truly came down.

Arthur Fountain loaned the theater to Las Cruces Community Theatre during the 1960s, giving local actors a home until the troupe moved downtown in 1977.

His son, Artie Fountain, revived movies and welcomed productions by New Mexico State University's theater department before the Mesilla Valley Film Society moved in during 1989, introducing generations of audiences to independent, foreign and classic films.

When deterioration threatened the building, another chapter began. After the property left Fountain family ownership in 2007, preservation efforts culminated in a major restoration completed in 2015. Heating and cooling systems were added, hardwood floors were refinished, historic murals repaired and modern digital projection installed, ensuring the theater could continue serving audiences without sacrificing its historic character.

It would have been easy for the Fountain Theatre to disappear somewhere between vaudeville and Netflix. Instead, it has adapted to every new era while remaining exactly what Albert Fountain Jr. intended more than a century ago: a place where people gather to share stories.

In that sense, the oldest theater in Mesilla has never really changed at all.