I’m a sucker for a great Richardsonian Romanesque Revival building, with all that rusticated stone and weighty, castle-like heft, the turrets and especially the broad entry arches and rows of round-arched windows.

Turns out I’m not the only one.

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Within minutes of walking into the stunning Mabel Tainter Center for the Arts, at 205 Main St., in Menomonie, Wisconsin – a textbook example of Romanesque Revival – Executive Director Lucas Chase tells me a couple pretty amazing things.

“I was just talking to the Wisconsin Historical Society and they said this is the second most architecturally significant building in the state after the Capitol,” Chase says, as we stand in what was the reading room when the building served as the town’s public library.

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Later, inside the theater space, he says that on the occasion of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, CNN wrote about what it deemed “15 of the world’s most spectacular theaters,” and there, alongside London’s Globe, Tokyo’s National Noh Theater and Paris’ Palais Garnier, among others, is Mabel Tainter.

And this 1889 gem – built as a memorial to a daughter who died too young – surely belongs there, with its Tiffany glass windows, its Sullivanesque stenciled decoration, its unique radiator heating system, its Cararra marble floors, the different woodwork in every room, a water-powered organ, original seats and more.

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It’s gorgeous outside – with its two turrets flanking the facade, which has as its centerpiece an elaborately carved stone arch that conjures the work of Louis Sullivan – but step inside and be amazed.

“I would say about 95 percent of it is original,” says Chase. “It hasn’t changed hardly at all.

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"Everything in the building is all hand-carved and hand-painted. There was no machine work used in the construction of the building.”

Chase says it took 16 months to construct the theater, which was built by Mabel’s parents as a memorial to their daughter, who died at the age of 19 while away at college. At the same time, Andrew and Bertha Tainter built Mabel's brother Louis Smith Tainter a wedding present of a house nearby.

Also a turreted Richardsonian Romanesque Revival building, that house is a landmark, too. Both were designed by architect Harvey Ellis of the Minneapolis firm of L. S. Buffington. The two are among the last surviving Ellis works.

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(The Tainters’ own house, an older, Italianate home, stood across the street from Louis’ house. It was later converted into a dormitory for UW-Stout, and Chase’s grandmother lived there for a time. It was demolished to make way for a larger dormitory that now occupies the site. Louis’ house is now home to the school’s alumni group.)

The National Register of Historic Places nomination form suggests that Ellis could’ve worked with Henry Hobson Richardson – eponym of the Richardsonian Romanesque style – and that he may have influenced Sullivan and Sullivan’s one-time employee Frank Lloyd Wright.

“His rendering mode was adopted by Frank Lloyd Wright and was one of the most popular around the turn of the century. He published and sold little, but among that known is a cover and decorative designs for Craftsman magazine. In his reading the architect was fond of William Morris and Grimm's Fairy Tales.

“Important questions have been raised about Ellis and his possible relationship to Richardson, Sullivan and Wright. For example it is possible that he had a hand in doing the ornamentation for Richardson's Albany State Capitol and certainly he was doing Sullivanesque ornament simultaneously with Sullivan. He had tremendous influence throughout the Midwest because his designs were frequently published in periodicals such as the Inland Architect. Ellis’ genius and influence is attested to by two projects.

“The first in 1887 for Buffington was a 29-story steel frame, all of a piece from base to attic, skyscraper; it is this that led Buffington to claim that he did the first skyscraper. The second is a design of a small bank, 1891, which was the first to break Midwest tradition. Wright's and Sullivan's designs followed later.”

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Captain Andrew Tainter made his money in lumber, Chase says, as a silent partner in Knapp, Stout & Co., a company at which he started as a steamboat captain (which is why the building has a few decorative references to the prow of a ship, including a fireplace mantle).

Thanks to the white pine forests in northwestern Wisconsin, Chase adds, which were felled to build the country’s westward expansion, there were, for a time, more millionaires in the Menomanie area than anywhere else if the world.

Two years after Mabel’s death in 1886, the Rev. Henry Doty Maxson arrived in town to organize a Unitarian Society.

The Tainters were Unitarians and were inspired by Maxson to create a memorial to Mabel that would serve the community. Somewhat secretly, they funded the project that went up on some land they owned in the heart of downtown Menomonie.

“Work on the building was commenced about a year ago,” wrote The Menomonie Times in 1890, “and its progress has been watched with a great deal of interest by the citizens of Menomonie and the surrounding cities and villages, and also by many outsiders who are interested in the work.

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“The plans of the building have been withheld from the public and although nearly everyone had formed conclusions, and surmised the character and plan of the institution, nobody knew positively what the captain’s intentions were, excepting possibly his intimate friends.”

The completed structure was to be a home to the Unitarian Society, a public library, a meeting hall for the local Grand Army of the Republic Civil War veterans chapter, and, because Mabel loved music and the arts, a theater.

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The exterior of the building is Dunnville sandstone quarried nearby, and the interior has mahogany, walnut and oak woodwork, brass fixtures, four fireplaces, and big iron radiators like I’ve never seen before.

The building was fitted with both gas and electric lights and a series of Edison lightbulbs above the fireplace in the former reading room are original to the building, 134 years old. A few have burned out, but remain in place, because ... 134 years old!

There are separate lounges for men and women, though interestingly for the time the women’s is the blue room, decorated in azure, and the men’s is rose pink.

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The lower level, which Chase says was previously a youth center that looked “like a church basement,” has been converted into a craft cocktail lounge called The Spirit Room, which is open to the public Thursdays through Saturdays.

On the main floor, behind the reading room is a former library space that still has its cast iron shelves. It’s now used for storage.

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The library, Chase says, occupied the building rent-free until 1986, when it built a new facility off-site.

The second-floor Grand Army meeting hall was home to Menomonie’s City Hall from the 1920s until 1960.

But the real jaw-dropper is the 261-seat, two-tier theater, which is Moorish in style, with its stenciling, decorative hanging fabrics, opera boxes, orchestra pit and more.

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To the left of the stage is the theater’s original Steere & Turner tracker pipe organ, which Chase says was the most expensive feature of the building, costing a whopping $5,000 in 1889.

Originally water-powered, the 28-stop organ was later converted to electricity.

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The pipes are tucked into the wall, though you can see them if you get close up to the grille in the wall that allows the sound to escape.

Take a seat in the balcony opera box to the left of the stage and you’ll have the disconcerting ability to see the organist below you as much of the floor is also a metal grate, so that the organist could hear the music, too.

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The organ underwent a full restoration that began in 1957. More recently, in 2007, the building got a modern addition at the back, mainly to make it ADA accessible with an elevator. The exterior of the addition has stone from the same quarry as the original building’s exterior cladding.

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The interior got a renovation, too, with a sprinkler system, modern wiring and fly loft upgrades, but also, as the website notes, “investigation and careful repair or reconstruction of the elaborate Moorish style decoration,” including the stencilwork.

The building cost $125,000 to erect and opened to the public on July 3, 1890, despite being unfinished.

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“Although herculean efforts have been made to complete the building in time for the opening,” wrote The Menomonie Times on that day, “many parts of it are still in an unfinished state, much to the annoyance of the directors and Captain Tainter. The greatest disappointment is the failure in the completion of the grand organ. ... As the next best thing, a smaller organ has been substituted for the occasion.”

Tainter funded the building’s operating costs for the rest of his life, and upon his death in 1899, he left a $65,000 endowment. In addition, Tainter donated his 3,000 books to help bolster the library, which moved into the building in January 1891 after having occupied a small space across the street.

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The building is still owned by the Mabel Tainter Literary Library and Educational Society, and it is operated by the nonprofit Mabel Tainter Center for the Arts.

Chase says that even though the building is now used mostly for concerts, theater productions (the local theater guild is the oldest in Wisconsin, he notes) and weddings, the building remains connected to the Unitarian Society.

“It is the permanent home of the Unitarian Society and they're welcome to use it whenever they want,” he says, as we stand in the main lobby with its marble water fountain and original box office window.

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“They use it a couple times a year. They moved to a smaller building that suits their needs better now. But yes, it is still a church.”

Free tours of the building are also offered on Fridays and Saturdays.

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“We do ghost tours around (Halloween) time,” he adds. “So it's a really busy building. We're currently working on building a $5 million endowment, and we've been debt free for about 10 years now.”

So, it’s not just the building and its architecture and decor that are amazing. The fact that 134 years after it was constructed in small town Wisconsin, the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building remains a community-focused space, and one that has resonated with generations of Menomonie residents.

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“People in Menominee are very connected to this building,” says Chase, “and have a lot of emotion for this building. It's great that they have that connection. People say it’s Menomonie's jewel.

“It really is kind of the hub of the downtown and the community.”