New owners have taken over the Indiana Theater in downtown Washington. The theater reopened with the Taylor Swift movie on Friday night. The new owners are Russ and Tonya Jordan and their daughter Phoebe.
The family is not strangers. Russ Jordan is the former minister at the New Hope Church. He worked in the insurance business and Tonya was a teacher before they moved to West Virginia for several years. Family circumstances brought them back to the area.
They had no intent to get into the theater business until a lunch with Dusty Davis.
“We were having lunch one day. He told me a previous deal to sell the theater fell through and asked if I wanted to buy it. My wife, daughter and I prayed about and thought about it over the weekend and I called him back and said let’s do this. So my wife Tonya and my daughter Phoebe and I are going to give it a whirl at running a theater,” said Jordan. “When we were in West Virginia, I helped my sons begin a landscaping service when they were 13 or 14 years old. They have grown that business to a 175 customer business with multiple employees. Our family has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I spoke with my daughter; she is a junior in high school. She said she would be interested. She has an LLC called Phoebe’s Feature Films. It’s all about family to us.”
The family intends to be very hands-on as owners.
“We are looking forward to being a part of the great history of the Indiana Theater. It is a natural fit for us and what we envision what our lives are supposed to be about; serving and being a part of the community that has been so good to us,” said Jordan. “I will be the managing operator. Because she still has this thing called high school, Phoebe will be one of our managers. She is working on employee schedules and reviewing films and working on the paperwork and learning the ins and outs of the operation.”
Davis took over the Indiana Theater at a time when it needed a lot of work and updating. He says his intent was always to fix it but never to operate it on a long-term basis.
“Our first thought on the theater was to save it,” he said.” We did a large part of the needed work under the previous owner and then purchased it from him and we made the rest of the repairs over the last couple of years. We let the theater operation fund those, so we felt we had reached the point where we were done working on the building and needed to hand it over to someone else to operate it. That is a business that needs someone in there full-time as an owner. That is what led us to look for the next owner.”
“We knew what the theater had been, when we lived here before, and I knew what downtown Washington looked like 15 or 16 years ago. The amount of investment and change in the downtown so that now it is alive and thriving is a positive. I know the amount of work Dusty and Ryan and Sean have put into the theater. That was appealing to us. The theater is in a good place for us,” said Jordan.
Davis says he feels the new owners are the right fit for the historic theater.