Coleman Theatre

George L. Coleman Sr., a Miami mining magnate in a county of lead and zinc mines, built the theater in less than a year at a cost of $600,000. It opened on April 18, 1929, to a full house of 1,600 who paid a dollar each. The Kansas City firm of Boller Brothers, designers of more than a hundred Midwestern theaters, gave it a Spanish Colonial Revival front and a Louis XV interior worked with gargoyles, dolphins, cherubs and faces. It was built as a vaudeville house, turned into a movie theater over the years, and has never gone dark. Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Sally Rand, Bing Crosby, Jim Thorpe, the magician Harry Blackstone and the ballerina Moscelyne Larkin all played its stage.

The organ is the reason many visitors come. The Mighty Wurlitzer was built in 1928, delivered for installation on February 21, 1929, and sold for $35,000, and the theater says it is the only 1928 Wurlitzer still in its original home. It still plays for silent films.

The ballroom in the original plans was never finished in 1929. For years it was a plastered shell used by the Masons and for building sets, and the Miami artist Charles Banks Wilson painted his murals for the Oklahoma State Capitol there because his studio across the street was too small for them. Now it is used for weddings, receptions and conferences. The theater, run by a nonprofit, has been in the National Register since 1983, and Route 66 runs past its door on Main Street.