John Schmidt purchased this lot in 1889, where the Mitchell Hotel, an early Nacogdoches stagecoach inn dating to about 1831, had previously stood, and commissioned architect D. Rulfs to build an opera house as a stopover for theatrical companies traveling between Shreveport and Houston. The Nacogdoches Opera House had a ticket office and other businesses on the ground floor, at first including general merchandise and a confectionery, while a wide staircase led to a second-floor theater with a high ceiling, a gallery, and a stage at the rear flanked by dressing rooms and served by an outside stairway for actors and scenery. Early accounts said the stage was very small and could not accommodate all productions, and although opera was performed there, most touring shows were plays, melodramas, occasional burlesques, and magic shows. After the touring season, the theater became a favored place for community recitals, benefits, town meetings, and dances often reviewed by the Daily Sentinel, which in 1907 reported that a large crowd of dancers and several chaperones enjoyed a pleasant dance there. In 1907, the Nacogdoches Civic League and the Nacogdoches Fire Department were both organized at this site. Around 1907, the Marx Brothers first developed their improvisational style of comedy there when a disturbance on Main Street drew much of the audience away; accounts differed on whether a runaway horse or a mule wrecked a cart, but the brothers responded by racing about the stage in a frenzy of comic behavior, and their parody and antics brought the audience back and launched a new direction in their comic careers. According to Groucho Marx, the performance even produced the first Groucho-ism, "Nacogdoches is full of roaches," and he and his brothers were arrested shortly afterward for playing euchre on the porch of their hotel. The building ceased to be a theater in 1923, and sometime afterward the new owner, D.K. Cason, replaced the original red brick facade with a less ornamented one and renamed it the Cason Building. Later tenants included Cason-Monk Furniture, Mize Department Store, architect Hal Tucker's office, and Hooper-Barr Art Gallery. In 2001, the D.K. Cason Estate gave the building to Stephen F. Austin State University's Real Estate Foundation for an arts center.