Williamston still has a one-screen movie house on its main drag

Buy a ticket at the Sun Theatre on a Friday night and you’re walking into a kind of building most towns lost decades ago: a single-screen, downtown movie house, the marquee throwing light onto the sidewalk of the main street. Williamston, a small town east of Lansing where the Red Cedar River runs through, still has one.

The Montgomery family built the Sun in 1947 on the downtown drag. It replaced an older theater, the Grand, that had been knocked out by fire and equipment trouble. For a while the Sun was the place — one screen, one show at a time, the whole town’s Saturday night. Then television and the multiplex did to it what they did to hundreds of small-town theaters. By the late 1970s the Sun was dilapidated and shut.

What saved it was a couple, Russ and Carol Robitaille, who bought the wreck in 1979 and spent a year putting it back together. The renovated Sun reopened in 1980 as a charming one-screen cinema, and it has kept running as one ever since — current films, one auditorium, real butter on the popcorn if you ask.

There’s a second stage in town that confuses visitors. The Williamston Theatre is a separate place, a live professional playhouse a few doors down, so the small town actually carries two working theaters at once. The Sun is the one with the film projector and the glowing marquee.

Putnam Street, where a lot of the antique shops sit, carries its own old name — it honors Hiram and Joseph Putnam, brothers who cut a trail through this stretch of forest back in 1834. The town grew up around that trail, and the Sun is still throwing light onto it.