The Ramsdell Theatre, where James Earl Jones first walked on stage

Look up inside the Ramsdell Theatre and you’ll find Venus driving a chariot across the ceiling, painted by the builder’s own son. The lawyer and businessman Thomas Jefferson Ramsdell spent more than $100,000 of his own money on this place and opened it on September 4, 1903, after fire had claimed two of Manistee’s earlier opera houses. For a Lake Michigan lumber town, it was an outrageous splurge — a Chicago architect, Solon Spencer Beman, designing a jewel box of a playhouse on Maple Street.

The room still looks the part. A horseshoe balcony curves around on a forest of slim pillars, painted green and gold up to a tin ceiling. The front curtain shows a grove near Athens. The two lobby murals and that ceiling dome were painted by Frederic Winthrop Ramsdell, the builder’s son, who had trained as an artist — so the family didn’t just pay for the building, they painted it.

The line people remember, though, is younger. A teenage James Earl Jones — who grew up nearby on a farm and worked through a stutter as a boy — got his start here, acting and managing the stage at the Ramsdell. The voice that would later belong to Darth Vader and Mufasa first carried in this small-town hall. Jones came back twice in the 1990s to help raise money when the theater needed saving.

That rescue worked. After decades of hard use the building was restored, and it runs year-round now as a regional arts center, with a few hundred seats and a community theater company that has been performing for generations. It’s the kind of room where you can sit in the balcony, look up at a painted goddess, and realize the acoustics were built for a human voice long before microphones existed.