Farmyard Drive-In

In 1960, at his farm within the Mt Pleasant township two miles north of the unincorporated community of Potter, Andrew Ernzen painted the side of a barn white to show movies. He advertised it as the Farmyard Drive-In in the May 26, 1960 Atchison Daily Globe. (His sons later remembered, in a lengthy story in the November 18, 1990 Globe, that the first film, shown earlier that year, was “Come Next Spring” with Walter Brennan.)

In 1965, he built a 24x48-foot plywood screen. Sons Jerome and Ambrose ran two Brenkert projectors, purchased from the owners of Atchison’s Orpheum Theater, in a small metal building on Friday and Saturday nights after working in the field. Ernzen operated the Farmyard Drive-In until he suffered a stroke in May 1979. The tattered remains of the screen were still standing in 1990.

The 1976 Motion Picture Almanac included the Farmyard Drive-In, capacity 100 cars, under Atchison.

A 1982 aerial photo showed the remains of a small drive-in just east of the farm at the intersection of Rawlins Road and Potter Road.

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