Natalie Drive-In
Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania1949-1983
Order Natalie Drive-In tees, long sleeve tees and hoodies. Natalie's colliery closed in 1952, three years after the theater opened, but the drive-in kept going with first-run horror and science fiction double bills. A surviving snack bar sign offers orange or grape drink at 15 and 25 cents. Browse the styles below, and the full Natalie history is further down. We are an American small business bringing back the signs and logos of places and teams that are long gone but remembered fondly.
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Natalie Drive-In History
The Natalie Drive-In near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, opened on May 6, 1949, with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. It took its name from Natalie, the coal village it stood in, on Route 54 beside what its opening ad called the famous Natalie Market. The ad, run the day before, promised 850 in-car speakers and a 70-foot screen. The first 1,000 ladies got a free carnation, the children got lollipops, and the grand awards for the first weekend included Norge appliances, among them a 1949 refrigerator.
Natalie's colliery closed in 1952, three years after the theater opened, but the drive-in kept going. In the 1950s it ran first-run horror and science fiction double bills, and a surviving snack bar sign offers orange or grape drink at 15 and 25 cents. Its roadside sign was a long red arrow with a curled tail and the name in tall letters, and Cinema Treasures says it matched the sign at the Mahoning Drive-In exactly.
In its last years, according to commenters, it ran X-rated bills under the Magazzu family of Hazleton, and an ad from the period has a 3-D adult double feature with no one under 18 admitted. One researcher gives its closing as November 27, 1983.
The grounds later hosted paintball. The screen was still standing in 2016, in poor shape, and the snack bar was still there too. The sign has since fallen.