The Mabel Tainter Memorial

In the center of Menomonie stands one of the most elaborate acts of grief in Wisconsin architecture: a Romanesque public theater and library built by a lumber baron in memory of his daughter, who died at nineteen.

Mabel Tainter was the daughter of Captain Andrew Tainter, one of the principal partners of Knapp, Stout and Company, the logging operation that made Menomonie briefly the lumber capital of the world. Mabel loved music, theater, and the arts. She died in eighteen eighty-six after a short illness, and her parents were devastated. A Unitarian minister suggested to Andrew and Bertha Tainter that rather than a conventional monument, they might build something the community could use, something that would, in his words, deepen, broaden, and heighten the entire round of life.

Construction began in April of eighteen eighty-nine. The design came from the Minneapolis firm of L. S. Buffington and has long been credited to Harvey Ellis, though some researchers now favor Edgar Joralemon. It has an unusual visual vocabulary, combining Moorish curves and pointed arches with Victorian Romanesque stonework and hand-carved details framing the main entrance. The building material was Dunnville sandstone, quarried along the Red Cedar River just downstream. The theater took only sixteen months to complete and opened to the public in eighteen ninety.

Inside, the original theater survives essentially intact: curved wooden balcony, ornate plasterwork, a pipe organ, and a reading room lined with books from Andrew Tainter's library. The whole effect is of a European concert hall transplanted to a Wisconsin river town by someone who had the money and the grief to do something extraordinary with both.

The Mabel Tainter is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still operates as a performing arts center. Lumber money built it. Nineteen years of a girl's life gave it its name.