DOWAGIAC — A year marked with triumph and tragedy, of new beginnings and fond farewells, of unity and conflict, 2017 was littered with unforgettable moments in the history of Dowagiac.

Before we flip the calendar to yet another New Year, our newsroom has taken a look back at the seminal events of the past 12 months, as we have counted down the top 10 stories of the year, as determined by our staff.

Our countdown concludes with our top story of 2017:

1. Southwestern Michigan College launches fundraising campaign for new nursing facility

After spending the last several decades building new residence halls and refurbishing other facilities across the school’s two campuses, this year, Southwestern Michigan College leaders set their sight building a new, improved home for its premier education program: nursing.

The college is currently building a $9.6 million expansion of its Nursing and Health Education Building, located near the heart of its Dowagiac campus. The renovated building will offer state-of-the-art classrooms and learning laboratories to its students, and its expanded size will allow the school to admit more people into the program, leaders said.

To help cover the cost of the expansion, the community college announced in February that it was launching a massive fundraising campaign. Over the last several months, several organizations and individuals — including two of the area’s major health care providers, Lakeland and Borgess — contributed to the campaign.

The college recently received its largest contribution to date: a $250,000 gift from alumnus Kelly Rose, an Edwardsburg native who went on to become a legend in the recreational vehicle industry. In honor of the gift, the college will name one of the building’s new simulation labs as “Karen K. Rose Simulation Lab,” in recognition of Kelly’s wife, herself an alumna of SMC’s nursing program.

Kelly, who met Karen when they both attended the school, had been looking to make a donation to the college ever since he delivered a commencement ceremony at his alma mater in 2016, said SMC President David Mathews. Seeing the impact that SMC nursing’s program made in their lives — Karen’s job at Elkhart General Hospital “paid the bills for a while” while Kelly’s RV business was getting off the ground — the business magnate knew exactly where his donation would get the most bang for his buck.

On Karen’s 65th birthday in October, Kelly showed his wife virtual reality “fly-through” video tour of the expanded nursing facility that their donation will help fund.

“I don’t know too many people who have bought their wife a $250,000 birthday present,” Mathews said.

So far, the college has raised around $700,000 in donations to help pay for the facility, which is currently under construction, Mathews said. It is a massive amount of money to raise in less than a year, especially for a small county like Cass, Mathews said.

In November, the college widened its fundraising efforts to the general public, launching its Building Healthy Futures campaign to solicit smaller private donations from the community.

The college has sought to transform its nursing building for the past five years, and received a $4 million capital outlay from the state in 2016 to help make it happen. The college will pick up where the state dollars and donations leave off, Mathews said.

Mathews said the college is building the expansion in order to provide the college’s nursing students with a quality facility that matches the excellent standard of the school’s health care instruction.

“Nursing has been our flagship program since the school’s inception,” Mathews said. “More than 3,000 nursing students have graduated in the history of the college. Our graduates are in high demand. Hospitals, doctor’s offices, clinics all want them. And the students themselves are able to receive a good paying job to support themselves and their families.”

The expanded building will have room for eight new classrooms, which will include 20 beds for nursing instruction, dedicated rooms for specialized demonstrations and four state-of-the-art simulation labs, where students can work with robots capable of simulating childbirth and other common procedures. Mathews said these simulation labs will not only elevate SMC’s nursing program above other community colleges in the area, but will rival those at four-year universities.

“There will be no finer technical learning environment for nursing students anywhere in the region,” he said.

The building will also borrow design elements from the college’s recent renovations of its P.D. O’Leary and Daugherty buildings, incorporating more windows into the design to provide greater natural lighting, as well as building a lounge area to facilitate more interaction between students and faculty outside the classroom.

The larger facility should allow the college to bump up the number of students it may admit to the program, from 40 to 56.

During the summer, the college awarded a $7 million contract to Grand Rapids’ Rockford Construction Co. for construction. In lieu of a groundbreaking ceremony, the school hosted a celebration ceremony, where leaders invited several area lawmakers to participate, including Michigan Budget Director Al Pscholka, who was instrumental in securing state dollars for the nursing building during his last term as a representative in the state House.

Construction on the expansion is expected to take place through most of 2018. The college expects to begin teaching its first batch of students in the facility in January 2019.