Round Oak Stove founder Philo D. Beckwith’s estate spared no expense building for $60,000 — about $2 million today — the first memorial theater in the United States and only the second in the world.

Its Romanesque style featured 18-foot arches with a facade of Lake Superior red sandstone, stained glass windows, boxes, an orchestra pit and a drop curtain “that was a piece of artwork in itself.”

Two stained glass windows are displayed at The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College, which replicated the theater on a smaller scale.

For the Beckwith’s opening, there were 36 hanging pieces of drop scenery for a combination of 76 set possibilities, 499 stuffed plush mohair seats in the parquette and balcony levels and 200 balcony chairs for a capacity of about 700.

The stage measured 50 feet long and 38 feet deep, with 15 dressing rooms.

Busts across the exterior depicted noted artists, authors and composers — women such as Dowagiac visitor Susan B. Anthony on the lower row — and Beckwith alone at the top.

A constant backdrop in Dowagiac life during its lifespan from January 1893 until demolished in 1966, “The One That Got Away” is thought to have hosted march maestro John Philip Sousa, some Barrymores and the Marx Brothers, as well as all manner of City Council meetings, festivals featuring daredevil The Bicycle Man, who leaped from ramp to ramp like a forerunner of Evel Knievel, the post office, Lee Brothers Bank, a millinery shop, Round Oak offices on the second floor and showrooms on the third floor.

The stage eventually housed The Wigwam, a restaurant which felt like the inside of a tepee.

Everything about the Chicago-envied Beckwith Memorial Building, at least until it absorbed $10,000 damage in a 1911 fire, signaled showplace, though live stage entertainment ended in 1928 and gave way to a Beckwith Theatre movie house.

Museum Director Steve Arseneau, who once lived downtown in an apartment overlooking what is today Beckwith Park, home of the summer concert series, wrapped up The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College’s “fall” lecture series with a packed house despite snow accumulating.

“I call it The One That Got Away’ because if you talk to any people around Dowagiac in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, to a man or woman they all say, ‘Why did they tear that building down? Why isn’t that building still there?’ ” said Arseneau, who joined the museum in 1998.

Settlers first came to Dowagiac in the 1830s. Michigan Central Railroad’s 1848 arrival led the transition from “pockets of people” to a village.

“Small, incremental growth” followed for 30 years, Arseneau related, with Dowagiac becoming the wheat-shipping hub for a 25-mile radius of southwest Michigan.

One reason Dowagiac grew slowly is that fires kept decimating early wood-framed buildings.

By the 1870s, brick structures began lining the west side of Front Street. Undeveloped parkland remained on the east side along the train tracks.

“It all changes with (P.D. Beckwith),” Arseneau said of the former Niles and Battle Creek resident born in upstate New York in 1825. He settled in Dowagiac in 1852 and eventually put the Grand Old City on the map.

His foundry on S. Front Street was located about where the Chestnut Towers high-rise is today.

“He cast anything — plows, repairs, sleighs, wagon wheels. Eventually, in 1860, he hooked up with John Gage, a local farmer and inventor who got some patents on what is called the Roller Grain Drill. It was a planter. Before, you broadcast your seed by hand and covered it up,” Arseneau explained.

“Roller Grain Drill did several rows at a time all in one pass — a huge invention for farmers.”

Although horses pulled the planter, ads depicted cherubs flying around it, giving it a likeness to a Valentine’s Day card.

Gage doesn’t stay with the business venture long, but Beckwith continues to turn them out until his death even after his success with Round Oak.

“Beckwith’s in debt,” Arseneau said, “and credit wasn’t easy to get in the 1860s. Dowagiac bankers somehow didn’t trust him. He struggled until he used his foundry to cast his own heating stove. A representative from the Michigan Central Railroad line saw it, thought it was a great product and put one in the Dowagiac depot. Eventually, it becomes the heater for all the depots along the (MCRR) line from Detroit to Chicago. Business is booming all of a sudden. He incorporates Round Oak in 1871 and it becomes one of the major stove manufacturers in the country. The industry is the biggest employer in town and brings people in from the eastern United States and, eventually, from Europe.”

Beckwith becomes an influential man, serving as mayor for most of the 1880s.

He’s a philanthropist, with one of his first roles bringing Dowagiac a library. Beckwith dreams of building a big theater to spread arts and culture. “He took money he made and invests in the town and in his business, not building himself a huge mansion. He was an exemplary industrialist,” but health problems led to his January 1889 death.

“His legacy is profound,” Arseneau said. “Round Oak Stove was a leader in its industry. Management passed to his son-in-law, Fred E. Lee. Profits grew.”

Dowagiac had an “opera house,” but an 1890 bird’s eye view depicts it as a plain frame structure compared to the Beckwith Memorial Building which would fill in the blank canvas which stretched from Main Street to Park Place on the east side.

Dowagiac newspapers — not the Daily News, which was still five years away — said in February 1892 that the Beckwith Estate proposed to build a magnificent opera house “that no city the size of Dowagiac can anywhere near equal.”

It was not intended as an investment dependent on paying dividends, for in that regard would be “the biggest kind of a failure.”

Especially when it boasted electric lights ahead of stores around it and heat piped over from the nearby stoveworks through a tunnel burrowed under the tracks.

“They built it as a grand structure and realized it would not make any money,” Arseneau said. “But they had to have an election, approved by a wide margin in February 1892, because they wanted a couple of things from the city,” which is how the edifice came to contain the Dowagiac City Council chamber. The Beckwith Estate received a 30-year tax exemption from the city.

Construction began immediately between the corner of Beeson and Front streets and the Park Block drugstore and bookstore.

Most Dowagiac residents have probably seen photos of the pit, which looks like an Egyptian pyramid being erected.

There were horses at the bottom, as well as a sluice bringing water down for masons. It appears to be the view from the vantage point of where Beeson Street Bar is today.

In the spring of 1892, the cornerstone laying drew considerable attention. Beckwith’s daughter, Kate, spoke.

A time capsule, which remarkably preserved its contents now on display, was installed.

By the following January the yawning hole had been transformed into the ornate theater with stained glass thought to be Tiffany.

“It became a Chicago vision,” Arseneau said, with architect W.E. Brown, interior design by Albert, Grover and Burridge, sculpture by Leopold Bonet, executed by a Mr. Pinata.

Furnishings were mostly purchased at the landmark department store, Marshall Field’s.

A Chicago Times article in July 1892 remarked, “The only change one would wish in the plans for the gem of this house is that it might be transported to Chicago.”

The piece also stated, “Mr. Beckwith made a large fortune. Since his death, his heirs are keeping his memory green in a distinctively novel manner. They’re putting up the Beckwith Memorial — not a window, or a church, library hospital, but a theater, which is notable because it is the first built in the United States and the second in the world.”

“This was a big deal,” he said.

Arseneau added, “I went to a show in Chicago last year at another theater with an arched entryway that looks a lot like it on a bigger scale.”

Rhea Theater Company opened the Beckwith with Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Josephine” over three nights, Jan. 20, 21 and 25, 1893.

Tickets cost 50 cents to $3 — which could be half a day’s factory wages at the time, Arseneau said.

Beckwith’s friend, noted orator and “free-thinker” (atheist) Col. Robert Ingersoll spoke.

Programs were printed on silk with such a modern font it could have come from the 1960s or ’70s.