Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Alma: The Location

Alma’s post office (233 N. State Street). Photo by Megan Flattley.

Located in Central Michigan fifty miles north of Lansing, Alma was incorporated as a village in 1872 under “founder” (and the village’s first postmaster) Ralph Ely. Alma’s creation on Anishinaabe land was facilitated by the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. When established, Alma was just south of the Isabella Indian Reservation of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. As Alma and other settler towns grew, Reservation land shrank as land-hungry industries encroached (in this case, lumber). In fact, one of the Central Michigan lumber barons, Ammi Wright, who owned land outside of Isabella, had a great impact on the architectural landscape of Alma. This historical map gives you a sense of what the town looked like in 1885.

Cox’s mural hanging in its current location. Photographed by Megan Flattley in May 2023.

In 1938, Alma received a New Deal post office, which would eventually house Joe Cox’s mural. The 1941 Federal Writers’ Project guide to Michigan (a New Deal project funded by the Works Progress Administration) gives us a window into the area around the time that Cox created his mural. The author distinguishes the route from Clare to Lansing from the nearby lumber lands, writing of the booming oil and sugar beet industries. About Alma specifically, the author writes that the town (population 6,734) boasts a sugar factory and three oil refineries, in addition to Alma College. As we know from the Alma mural files in the National Archives, Cox noticed the same features, though he would struggle to depict them in a way that satisfied the Section. (See Process) In her 1991 book on New Deal art and theater, scholar Barbara Melosh described the experience of seeing Cox’s wheat harvest mural as “incongruous” after entering Alma on a highway lined with oil wells. Today, the refineries that Cox observed are closed. Cox’s mural, however, remains in its original location, in the lobby of the New Deal post office that still serves the community today.

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