above, An advertisement appearing in New York Clipper Annual 1901. By 1901 Huber's Museum was the oldest, and perhaps the greatest of the New York dime museums, and had expanded it's domain to include a roadhouse in the Bronx, a cafe-hotel, and even a horse farm in the Adirondacks.

from John Strausbaugh: Edwin S. Porter was a mechanic who went to work for Thomas Edison as a cameraman in 1900. He's considered the first American film director, the pioneer who took Edison's 1894 invention of moving pictures and figured out the rudiments of using the new technology to create entertainment for the masses. In 1903 he premiered two of the most significant works of early cinema--the ten-minute The Great Train Robbery (which, though brief and primitive, established a remarkable number of the tropes cowboy movies would employ to this day) and his 14-minute redaction of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Fittingly, both debuted at a venue of low entertainment-- Huber's Museum on 14th Street in New York City. Huber's was a dime museum. It displayed a grab-bag of odd items (including, most famously, a forgery of Abraham Lincoln's touching condolence letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, who had lost five sons in the Civil War), hosted vaudeville, circus and sideshow acts (a 17-year-old Harry Houdini honed his routine there), and could reasonably claim to be America's first movie theater, although the first nickelodeon, or space devoted specifically to screening movies, wasn't created until 1905. Huber's would screen short films as part of a larger revue of live acts. The debut screening of Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance, shared the bill with a team of "colored comedians." 

PLEASE NOTE: Huber's Museum is not the same as, nor should it be confused with Hubert's Museum! Many books and web-based sources have interchanged the names of these two dime museums, creating much confusion over the years. The page on Hubert's Museum can be found here.