The auditorium three women left to Sturgis

For a town of a few thousand people, Sturgis has an improbable building: a full civic auditorium with a real stage and a balcony, the kind of hall a much bigger city would fight to afford. Sturgis didn’t have to fight for it. Three women bought it, from their graves.

The building opened in 1955, and the names on it tell the story: Sturges-Young. Emma D. Young left more than $400,000 — a fortune in the early 1950s — earmarked for a civic auditorium for the town. The estates of two sisters, Stella Sturges Taylor and Clara Sturges, were combined with her gift to finish the job. None of the three lived to see a curtain rise in the place they paid for. They simply wrote into their wills that their money should become a stage, and it did.

They hired well. The design came from A.M. Strauss, a prominent Fort Wayne architect, and what he delivered was a clean mid-century civic hall scaled up past anything the town’s size would predict. For seventy years it has been where Sturgis holds the things a community holds — concerts, plays, ceremonies, the big nights that need a room with a balcony.

It’s worth a thought next time you sit in a half-empty small-town theater and wonder how it got built. In Sturgis the answer is three women who decided the town deserved a proper stage and quietly arranged, after they were gone, to leave it one.