Checking Out New Deal-Era Post Office Murals

In May 2019, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp sheet honoring five of the over one thousand Post Office Murals painted during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. One of the honored post office murals happened to be in the southern New Mexico town of Deming. With this information, I made a point of checking out that mural the next time I passed through Deming on my way to Bisbee, Arizona.

I certainly had been aware of post office murals before the stamp sheet was issued but had really not given them much thought. And I now wonder how many post offices murals I passed  by without taking the time to check them out? Fortunately, I did check out the murals in the Dubuque, Iowa post office while working on Exploring Galena and Dubuque on Foot in 2019 and included them in the book.

Early Settlers of Dubuque by Bertran Adams; Dubuque, Iowa

Early Mississippi Packet (boat) Dubuque III by William E. L. Bunn; Dubuque, Iowa

When the Dubuque mural project was put out for bid in 1934, it was hoped that Grant Wood of American Gothic fame would respond and win the bid. Because Wood was not interested in doing a mural, the project was awarded to two of his associates/students.

During the Depression, the WPA (Works Progress Administration) funded thousands of murals in schools and other public buildings to provide jobs for artists during a period when there was very little work for artists. Although the Post Office Murals are oftentimes thought of as a WPA project, they were NOT funded by the WPA. They were funded by the Treasury Department to provide high-quality artistic decoration for new Federal Buildings. (During the New Deal era, the Treasury Department was responsible for new building construction.) Although the Treasury Department’s program was not a “jobs program,” it did have the effect of providing work for artists during a very difficult period.

Established artists were invited to bid on the mural projects as they became available. Murals were expected to depict something about the location and to be painted in the “American Scene” style. For us today, they provide beautiful work of arts to enjoy and a peek at a world that is not so far away in time but one that is so very different than the one we live in today.

With my interest piqued, I have now added Post Office Murals to the many items I like to check out while traveling. With over a thousand murals to discover I doubt if anyone will be able to bag every one still standing, but finding them as your time permits is good way to see and learn something interesting about the communities you pass through. And if you dig a bit deeper, you may also find out that the artists oftentimes have as story as interesting as the one on the canvas.

With the pandemic now lifting enough to allow for road trips, I have had the opportunity to check out several murals this year and look forward to checking out more on future road trips. If you are interested in checking out murals in your neighborhood or while traveling, I have found these two websites to be very helpful.

Wikipedia has a very good list of the murals by state and city. The list includes the name of the mural and the artist when known. I cannot vouch if the list is 100% accurate or complete, but it certainly is a good place to start. Here’s the link if you’re interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_post_office_murals

The Living New Deal website has articles, maps, and the ability to search by artist, name, and location of all things New Deal. Here’s their link:

https://livingnewdeal.org/tag/post-office-murals/

Murals from Recent Road Trips

I have already talked about the post office mural in Madison, Illinois. So I won’t repeat that here, but here are several other murals that I had the opportunity to check out on recent road trips.

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

Truth or Consequences was named Hot Springs before 1951. The town changed its name as a publicity stunt in 1951 to honor the TV game show and even has a Ralph Edwards park. Its mural, Indian Bear Dance by Boris Deutsch, is absolutely fantastic and very appropriate for the community. The old post office is directly across the street from one of the town’s many natural hot springs that Native Americans took advantage of for soaking long before Europeans arrived on this continent. And the mural itself captures the movement of the dance so well that you expect to see the characters come alive.

Walsenburg, Colorado

Walsenburg is just east of the Spanish Peaks in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains. The mural The Spanish Peaks by Ernest L. Blumenschein perfectly captures the majesty of the mountains. Unfortunately, when I passed by, the light was not right for taking a decent photo of the peaks. The artist Ernest Blumenschein is famous for starting the Taos, New Mexico art colony after the wheel of the wagon that he and fellow artist Bert Phillips were driving broke down just outside of Taos in 1898. If you want to know more about how a broken wagon wheel led to an art colony, you can read about it in Hiking to History by Robert Julyan.

Hutchinson, Kansas and Osceola, Iowa

On a recent trip to the Midwest, I varied my normal route to pass through Hutchinson, Kansas to check out their mural, Threshing in Kansas by Lumen Martin Winter. After leaving Hutchinson, my day’s drive ended in Osceola, Iowa. Before going to sleep, I checked out the Wikipedia list of murals on the Internet and to my surprise discovered that Osceola had a mural. Needless to say, I checked out Arrival of the First Train by Byron B. Boyd the next morning. Osceola is on a former Burlington Route (now BNSF) main line and is still today a stop for Amtrak’s California Zephyr.

Wilmette, Illinois

The placement of In the Soil is Our Wealth by Raymond Breinin in Wilmette is a bit unusual as the mural depicts a very rural scene when, at the time of the mural’s painting, Wilmette was, and still is, very much a prosperous suburb connected to downtown Chicago by commuter rail. In doing an Internet search, I did learn that the artist, Raymond Breinin, was labeled by Time Magazine as “the windy city mystic.” Perhaps, the mural is a mystical depiction of the land before it became a suburb. The other unusual item about the Wilmette mural is that the post office building was expanded after the mural was installed and you now have to look through a window to see the mural on the wall of another room.

Chicago Lakeview Station

The Lakeview post office station is just a bit more than a half mile from Chicago’s famous Wrigley Field. The neighborhood post office also houses an absolutely fantastic mural, Chicago: Epoch of a Great City by Harry Sternberg. The center of the mural depicts the evolution of Chicago from a small frontier fort (Fort Dearborn) through the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the bustling 1930s, and still busy today, downtown. The right-hand side of the mural depicts the Stock Yards and how Chicago grew from the agricultural bounty of the surrounding land. The Stock Yards are no longer part of the Chicago scene as they have been gone for more than 50 years. The left-hand side of the mural depicts Chicago’s industrial side with railroads and the heavy manufacturing that existed in Chicago at the time of the mural. Like the Stock Yards, much, if not most, of the heavy industry depicted in the mural no longer exists in Chicago. The mural is an exclamation point on how today’s world is so different than the New Deal era.

Weatherford, Oklahoma

Terminus of the Railroad, 1898 – 1901 by Oscar Berninghaus. The artist Oscar Berninghaus, like Ernst Blumenschein, was one of the early Taos artists. His mural has a lot of nice detail. Unfortunately, the placement of lighting in the post office building and the resulting reflection makes it hard to get a decent picture.

Sayre, Oklahoma

I have very mixed feelings about The Opening of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Country by Vance Kirkland. The mural itself is fantastic as it captures the energy, movement, and excitement of the Oklahoma Land Rush. But it also indirectly depicts how a treaty was broken to take away land that had been promised to the Cheyenne and Arapaho and then given to others. The mural also depicts how different our world is today from the time of the Land Rush. At that time, land represented security and the ability to sustain oneself, and people would go to any length necessary to obtain it. Today a farming enterprise needs an enormous amount of acreage and capital investment to make it worthwhile. As a result most of us now have found that our best opportunity is to be off the land. No matter what you may or may not feel about a particular mural, it is still an opportunity to peek into another world and learn something.

Amarillo, Texas

The Federal Courthouse on East 5^th Street in downtown Amarillo was built in in 1937-38 as a Post Office and Courthouse. Sometime later, the Post Office moved to another location and left behind six post office murals by Julius Woeltz. Like all courthouses, security is very tight and it is difficult to get a good angle for a decent photo of the murals. The six murals depict various aspects of Texas Panhandle life and history. One of the murals even depicts Coronado’s Expedition in Palo Duro Canyon.

I hope this brief glimpse of the wonderful world of murals out there waiting for you to discover will make them worthwhile stops on your future road trips. Since you can never be certain if the Wikipedia list of murals is complete, you might also want to check out the corner or dedication stones of what looks like what may be, or may have been, a post office building to see if was built during the New Deal. If it was, there is very good chance that it has, or at one time had, a mural and is well worth stepping inside to check it out.

If you find a fabulous mural or know of something I should looking for while on a road trip, please email me or leave a comment below. Thank you.