The Sheboygan Municipal Auditorium and Armory was designed by Sheboygan architect Edgar Stubenrauch and built in 1941 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The WPA was an organization created by an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. The Sheboygan Armory, the Sheboygan County Courthouse, the city's main post office, Farnsworth Jr. High/Middle School and the original Sheboygan North High School building (now Urban Middle School) were a part of the 116,000 buildings that were built by WPA.

The Armory was built on a former lumberyard of the Freyberg Lumber Co. owned by the Freyberg Novelty Furniture Company with an adjacent factory south of Pennsylvania Avenue and North 4th Street. However, proposed building location was once in Lake Michigan at the original mouth of the Sheboygan River. The proposed design was of reinforced concrete except for a steel bowstring truss roof. The exterior walls of the building also are concrete.

The original intended purpose of the Armory was to house Wisconsin Army National Guard's 32nd Division. The building was equipped with ammunition lockers and vaults for guns and other military equipment used by the Guard. The Armory hosted the National Basketball Association's Sheboygan Redskins from 1942 until 1951. The building was the site of high school basketball games, circuses and other local events such as blood drives, and when the city's Hmong American community began to flourish in the mid-1980s, became the site of Hmong New Year celebrations.

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