By Jim Bloch
If you thumbed through the July-August 2023 edition of Smithsonian magazine, you may have been surprised to see a photograph of the United States Post Office in St. Clair, MI.
What the heck?
It turns out that the post office is in Red Cloud, Nebraska, not St. Clair.
Red Cloud is the nearest town to the farm that was the childhood home of the great prairie novelist Willa Cather. Her family moved there from Virginia in 1883 and launched a small sheep ranch.
2023 is the 150th anniversary of Cather’s birth, which occasioned the story in Smithsonian. Cather is best known for her trio of Great Plains novels, her first book “O Pioneers” in 1913, “The Song of the Lark” in 1915 and “My Antonia” in 1918.
The interior of the post office in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
Red Cloud is home to the National Willa Cather Center and the 600-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie with its two miles of trails through the native grasses and wildflowers.
The post office buildings in St. Clair and Red Cloud are nearly identical. They were built in accordance with the same architectural plans used for hundreds of post offices around the country built during the Great Depression. According the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Real Estate, 1,895 post offices were built 1929-1939, peaking in 1937 with 332 postal buildings constructed.
The St. Clair Post Office was built in 1936. The Red Cloud Post Office went up in 1939.
Besides Cather, Red Cloud is best known for its corn. St. Clair’s main industry when Cather was a child was shipbuilding. Today, the city is probably best known for what you put on corn — Diamond Crystal Salt.
Post office murals
The differences in each city’s historical economies is reflected in the murals on the walls of the post offices.
The Red Horse post office features three 1941 murals by Archie Musick, a student of painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton, who championed the Regionalist art movement along with artists such as Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry: “Loading Cattle,” “Stockade Builders,” and “Moving Westward.”
In 1939, three years after the opening of the St. Clair Post Office, Detroit artist James Calder installed his 12-foot wide “St. Clair River” mural above the oak door labeled “Postmaster,” the typical spot for the majority of post office paintings purchased by the federal government during the Great Depression.
Calder’s mural looks as if it could have been painted today. A huge freighter steams toward the center of the canvas. A trio of seagulls dances above the choppy river. A tug called “St. Clair” cuts across the middle of the big painting. A second freighter churns toward the city. The smoke stacks and boxy outline of the Diamond Crystal Salt Company rise in the background as another freighter offloads the coal that will power the plant’s boiler.
The St. Clair mural is one of three Michigan post office murals painted by Calder. In Rogers City, he painted “The Harbor at Rogers City” in 1941, an oil-on-canvas effort similar to the St. Clair work. In 1938, he painted “Waiting for the Mail” on the wall of the Grand Ledge Post Office, portraying a farm family anticipating their daily delivery.
Musick’s “Loading Cattle” is nearly Calder’s opposite. His palette is full of browns and beiges where Calder’s brims with blues and grays. The animals in both are white, the startling white gulls over the St. Clair River and the cows in Musick’s fenced prairie, which cowboys are leading into a boxcar. With its slatted fences, numerous animals and half-dozen handlers, Musick’s painter is busier than Calder’s, which is more dramatic in its color contrasts and design.
“Throughout the United States—on post office walls large and small—are scenes reflecting America’s history and way of life,” wrote Patricia Raynor in 1997 in “New Deal Post Office Murals” for the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. “Post offices built in the 1930s during Roosevelt’s New Deal were decorated with enduring images of the ‘American scene.’”
“Artists have got to eat just like other people,” proclaimed Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s relief administrator, defending the program.
The Smithsonian article identifies Musick as “a WPA artist,” referring to the Works Progress Administration, the FDR program that put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public works projects.
But it’s likely he worked for the Section of Fine Arts.
“Often mistaken for Works Progress Administration art, post office murals were actually executed by artists working for the Section of Fine Arts,” wrote Raynor. “Commonly known as ‘the Section,’ it was established in 1934 and administered by the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department.”
The Treasury Department set aside about one percent of the cost of a new post office for public art work.
“Post offices were located in virtually every community and available for viewing by all postal patrons—which made post office murals a truly democratic art form,” Raynor said.
Calder was born in Detroit on March 29, 1907. He graduated from the Society of Arts and Crafts Art School in Detroit, now known as the Center for Creative Studies.
The postal murals typically feature American scene painting, where themes of hard work, family and local traditions are portrayed.
“Although the mural program was inspired by a Mexican mural tradition strongly affected by social change, the hard realities of American life are not illustrated on post office walls,” said Raynor.
Regionally, the “Industry” murals at the Detroit Institute of Art by Diego Rivera provide an excellent example of themes the Section discouraged artists from pursuing.
“Scenes of industrial America, for instance, avoid tragic portrayals of industrial accidents,” Raynor said. “Social realism painting, though popular at the time, was discouraged. Therefore, the very real scenes of jobless Americans standing in bread lines are not to be found on post office walls.”
The nearest post office mural to the one in St. Clair is Frank Cassara’s 1941 “Cattle Auctions” in a nearly identical post office in Sandusky.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
