Located at 515 Rusk Street in downtown Houston, the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse was named after U.S. Representative Robert R. Casey. The United States District Court for Southern Texas resides in the Casey building, and it serves a broad region of southeastern Texas, including the cities of Corpus Christi, Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Victoria, Houston, and Galveston.
In recent times, the Casey building has served as home to six beautiful murals that were re-discovered in the basement of the Houston Parcel Post Building in 1976. The story of the paintings, their disappearance, and re-discovery offers a revealing look into the history and politics of twentieth century Houston.
The murals’ tale began in the mid-1930s, when Dallas artists Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue submitted an unsuccessful bid to paint the Dallas Post Office Terminal as part of an ongoing New Deal public works project administered by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. This program supported national artists who decorated more than 65 post offices in Texas with nearly 100 murals depicting scenes of local history, culture, and industry. Although Bywaters and Hogue were turned down for the Dallas project, they were later awarded a similar job painting the Houston Parcel Post Building.
Williamson Gerald (Jerry) Bywaters was born in Paris, Texas, on May 21, 1906, and he studied art at the New York Art Students League. Bywaters specialized in landscapes, portraits, lithograph prints, and murals. According to Francine Carraro, Bywaters' style was indicative of a larger national movement in the 1930s, called the "American Scene," which inspired local artists to create works that honored their community's heritage.
Alexandre Hogue was born in Memphis, Missouri, on February 22, 1898, and he moved with his family to Denton, Texas, in the early twentieth century. Hogue attended Bryan Street High School in Dallas and graduated in 1918. He then traveled to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for one year before returning to Texas, where he worked as an illustrator for the Dallas Morning News. As an artist, Hogue became known for his abstract landscape paintings and murals.
When Bywaters and Hogue joined the Dallas Nine -- a group of prominent painters and sculptors in the early 1930s -- they discovered a mutual love and respect for the culture of East Texas. After receiving their Houston commission from the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, Hogue and Bywaters researched the history of the city’s shipping industry for two years before painting six murals on the subject. On July 6, 1941, Bywaters and Hogue's murals were presented to the Houston Parcel Post Building during a highly publicized ceremony. At six feet by eighteen feet, each of the massive murals encompassed an entire wall of the Parcel Post building.
The Bywaters and Hogue murals explored the day-to-day workings of the Houston Ship Channel. For example, Hogue’s “The Diana Docking" featured a colorful tableau showing a riverboat docking on the Buffalo Bayou. In the painting, a group of passengers wait to board, while African American men prepare to load goods onto the ship; a statue of a Native American man stands behind the group, smoking a long pipe. According to historians Nancy Young, William Pederson, and Byron Daynes, another of Hogue’s painting, "Houston Ship Channel--Early History," showcases early river boat traffic, as well as efforts to "survey, clear, dredge, and build the Houston canal.” Likewise, Bywaters’ murals, "Loading Cotton" and "Loading Oil," depict strong dock workers loading bales of cotton and oil onto shipping vessels in the Houston Ship Channel.
Taken together, Hogue and Bywaters' murals highlight the determination and dignity of everyday people who worked in Houston’s shipping industry. Yet, sometime in the 1950s, the murals were removed from the Parcel Post Building. The images, which had once represented the hope and determination of the American working-class, became symbols of organized labor and socialism during the Cold War hysteria that swept through Houston during the 1950s and 1960s. Luckily, the paintings were re-discovered and moved to the Casey building before Bywaters passed away in 1989 and Hogue died in 1994. In fact, the paintings were restored in 2006 so that future generations could enjoy them and the story they tell.
]]>Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but for many the plantation was merely replaced by the chain gang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many southern states participated in convict lease programs. Texas was no different. The state provided prisoners for cheap labor and used the income to help feed and house the convicts. Companies wanted the most amount of work for the least amount of money, and often convicts were overworked and abused. The prisoners lived in work camps and often worked in chain gangs. One such work camp, located near present day Maydelle was Camp Wright, which housed convict laborers from the Rusk Penitentiary.
The prisoners at Camp Wright built the Mewshaw State Sawmill in 1908 and cranked out 35,000 feet of East Texas lumber a day. Much of that wood was hauled on the newly-built railroad and used as as charcoal for the prison's iron foundry. However, the sawmill was destroyed by fire in 1912 and was never rebuilt, and then Rusk Penitentiary closed five years later.
In 1910, the village of Maydelle developed near the rail line west of Rusk. Then in 1933, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp was established near Maydelle on the old Mewshaw camp site. Like sixteen other CCC camps, Maydelle was assigned to the Texas Forest Service. Company 883 was stationed here and assigned forest conservation projects. Maydelle CCC jobs included planting trees, clearing scrub brush, fighting fires, controlling pests, and digging ditches. The men constructed a variety of structures and land projects, from flood barriers and lakes to fences and lookout towers. By 1936, they had finished 132 miles of forest roads, 800 flood drains, 162 bridges, and 45 miles of telephone lines.
In an oral history interview conducted in 2008, Jane Purtle of the Cherokee County Historical Commission talked to two brothers, Rubien and Forrest Barrington, who both served in the CCC in Texas. Rubien worked in Maydelle, and Forrest worked in Jacksonville. The brothers remembered their time in the CCC as formative. They described the full-time work as hard, but enjoyable. The brothers cleared fields and built roads. To the Barrington boys, the CCC was their first taste of military life. Their camp also offered recreation and education opportunities. Rubien remembered basketball and baseball teams, and that every weekend they would drive to Jacksonville for a twenty-cent movie.
The Maydelle CCC camp was closed in 1937 due to budgetary constraints, but it made a lasting impact on the area.
For more (including 8 images & 2 audio files) view the original article
]]>The Paris Public Library hosts four murals painted by Texas Jerry Bywaters as part of the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1934. Two of the panels tell the story of the Great Paris Fire of 1916 and the town's subsequent reconstruction. The historic fire destroyed most of Paris’ central business district, including the Lamar County Courthouse. Despite damage estimates that ran to more than 11 million dollars, local residents rebuilt the town of Paris within a few years. To commemorate this process, the second panel in the series depicts the industry and resilience of the local citizenry. The mural highlights the reconstruction process and features the new county courthouse in the background.
The two other murals in the series feature well-known figures in Texas history, Davy Crockett (who died fighting at the Alamo) and cattleman John Chisum (a major figure in the southwestern cattle industry in the late nineteenth century).
The muralist, Jerry Bywaters, served as a professor of art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and helped to define a distinctly Texan style of art that had much in common with the Regionalist style of the era. Regionalism was an American realist movement that was popular from the 1920s to the 1950s. In this style, artist emphasized scenic, earthy portraits of rural life, while shunning city life and developing technological advances. Bywaters in particular added a distinctly Texan feel to this art by showcasing earth tones, cowboys, and small rural towns like Paris.
This mural series was funded by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which operated under the jurisdiction of the Federal Treasury department. The PWAP was, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, a way of increasing employment during the Great Depression. Artists were employed as hourly laborers to beautify public buildings.
]]>Located 125 miles east of Dallas, the city of Longview is known for its rolling hills and scenic areas. The town was incorporated in 1871, after Ossamus Hitch Methvin Sr. sold one hundred acres of land to the Southern Pacific Railroad for the establishment of a new settlement. Railroad managers apparently named the town after the striking "long view" from Methvin’s home.
During its early years, Longview had a reputation for being a rough railroad town where violent disturbances were common. Yet, the railroad brought prosperity too. Following a disastrous fire in 1877 that destroyed many of the city’s wooden buildings, local citizens backed by the railroad built new brick and stone structures, including churches, schools, mills, and an opera house.
The Longview Post Office was constructed with support from the Treasury Department during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Architect Louis A. Simon and engineer Neal Melick oversaw the construction, and the building opened in 1939 at 201 E Methvin Street.
In the lobby of the Longview Post Office hangs a massive oil on canvas mural titled "Rural East Texas," which was painted by Thomas M. Stell Jr. in 1942. The mural celebrates the history of farming in East Texas and demonstrates how mechanization changed the agricultural industry.
Born in Cuero, Texas, in 1898, Thomas M. Stell Jr. displayed artistic talent at a young age. He trained as a draftsmen in Dallas, New York, and Chicago before attending the Rice Institute. In 1923, he moved to New York to study at the Arts Students League, training under the muralist Augustus Vincent Tack. In 1928, Stell returned to Dallas to teach at the Dallas Art Institute. He then joined the Dallas Nine, a group of painters, print makers, and sculptors living and teaching in Dallas in the 1930s.
As an artist and teacher, Stell mirrored the work of early Italian and Flemish painters, becoming a master portraitist who strove to connect his work with the viewing public. Stell's work includes "Portrait of Janet Kendall" (1934), "Portrait of Dale Heard" (1935), and "Portrait of Wanda Ford" (1943).
The Works Progress Administration hired Stell to be the state director of the American Index of Design in 1938. Four years later, he moved to San Antonio to teach at Trinity University. During this period, Stell also painted the "Rural East Texas" mural for the Longview Post Office. Later, in 1945, he moved to Austin to teach and study drawing at the University of Texas, Austin, where he also entered graduate school. Thomas M. Stell Jr. returned to Dallas in the 1950s, where he remained an artist and teacher until his death in 1981.
]]>Kilgore, Texas, is located 120 miles east of Dallas in south-central Gregg County. Founded in 1872 by cotton planters, the town was named by the International-Great Northern Railroad in honor of Constantine Buckley Kilgore, a U.S. Representative from Texas. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the town remained a small rural enclave that catered to the agricultural needs of the region. That all changed in the 1930s, however, when the East Texas Oil Field was discovered.
Kilgore experienced a boom time when the vast petroleum reserves of the East Texas Oil Field became common knowledge. At the peak of the boom, Kilgore housed more than 1,000 oil wells, which were built right next to local homes and buildings. Prospectors traveled from all over the country to strike it rich, and local citizens began calling the era the "Gusher Age." Some of the major oil producing companies of the boom years included: Humble Oil and Refining Company, Yount-Lee Oil Company, the Texas Company (Texaco), Shell Petroleum Corporation, and the General American Oil Company.
The East Texas Oil Museum was constructed in honor of the people and culture of the Gusher Age. The museum, located on the campus of Kilgore College, promotes the history of oil discovery and production in the 1930s. It features a full scale rendition of an East Texas oil town, complete with period stores, automobiles, people and machinery.
Also on display at the museum are four oil on canvas murals painted by Xavier Gonzalez in 1941 as part of the
New Deal's public works of art program administered by the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture. The four murals, titled “Drilling for Oil,” “Contemporary Youth,” "Music of the Plains," and “Pioneer Saga,” explore many regional themes, including the oil industry, and early Texas settlement. The murals, originally located at the Kilgore Post Office, were moved to the East Texas Oil Museum in 1999.
Born in Almeria, Spain, in 1898 to Emilio Gonzalez Diaz de Paredes and Gracia Arpa Perea, Xavier and his family moved to South America and then Puebla, Mexico, in the early twentieth century. Gonzalez studied mechanical engineering in Mexico City, and later painting and sculpting at the San Carlos Academy in Puebla. In 1922, Gonzalez moved to the United States and found work as a draftsmen for a railroad in Iowa. Gonzalez then moved to Illinois and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Later, in 1925, Gonzalez moved to San Antonio to teach at the Witte Museum before moving in 1931 to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans. According to historian Christopher Long, Gonzalez is known for his "unusual versatility with a variety of figurative and abstract styles". Xavier Gonzalez passed away of leukemia in New York City in 1993.
]]>