Many people reading this remember the Showboat Ballroom in Lake Benton and can appreciate this big find by a former Marshall resident.

MARSHALL – The SHOWBOAT has risen again – at least the letters have. A former Marshall resident has donated his found art pieces to a Lake Benton museum.

Many longtime residents – and former residents – of southwestern Minnesota remember going to the Showboat Ballroom in Lake Benton.

Sadly, the iconic dance hall was closed in 1991. The building was erected in 1917 and was originally known as the Summer Resort and Pavilion.

Mark Murphy was living in Minneapolis in 1993 and was visiting his parents, Dwayne and Karen Murphy of Marshall. He was driving around the area with a friend, looking at places he used to go. One of those places was the Showboat. Murphy, who lived in Marshall from 1975 to 1990, remembers going there and seeing Litterer and the Johnny Holm Band.

According to a story in the Lincoln County Valley Journal in 1996, the Showboat “was truly a fantastic place with 6,000 square feet of dancing space…the biggest and best in southwestern MN drawing crowds from 100 mile radius of Lake Benton…wood benches surrounded the floor on three sides, two for sure, the band area being the east end.” Lawrence Welk played there in the 1920s and ’30s.

By 1993, the building was in disrepair – “uninhabitable,” Murphy said.

On the ground, in a pile of old lumber, were rusty tin letters – S H O W B O A T. He quickly picked them up knowing they deserved a better home than a trash pile.

“I grabbed them,” he said. “I figured I had rescued them, preserved them.”

In the years from 1993 to the present, Murphy has kept the letters in a box or sometimes on the wall as art. He moved them from house to house. For the past 18 years, Murphy has been living in Colorado working as an e-commerce solutions provider. He was browsing around on Facebook when an ad by Bloody Lake Screen Printing caught his eye about Showboat T-shirts for sale. That got him to thinking that there might be interest in the letters so he decided to donate them to the historical museum in Lake Benton.

“I never considered them mine,” he said.

Murphy is visiting his parents this week so he shipped the letters to their home in Marshall. On Tuesday he drove to the Heritage Center Museum in Lake Benton.

Lake Benton Area Historical Society board member Karen Lichtsinn was delighted with the donation.

“This is very exciting,” Lichtsinn said. “We are thrilled.”

Lichtsinn said when the ballroom was torn down in August of 1998, the proprietors didn’t realize its historical significance.

“They put the word out that people could come and take what they wanted,” Lichtsinn said.

Area residents have since donated to the museum items such as a booth, a porthole and a sign that says “You may not take beer into Showboat.” The letters will be included in the display.