Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Fisher’s mural depicts a small white farm family and, like many New Deal muralists, he implies that they settled on empty fertile land. Of course, this implication erases the long histories of Indigenous presence and land use in Michigan. In Chelsea’s case, it was the ongoing dispossession of the Potawatomi that facilitated Euro-American settlement in the 1830s. You can read more about early Chelsea settlers at the Chelsea Historical Society website and learn about the Potawatomi experience of removal from the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan.

The 1941 Federal Writers’ Project guide to Michigan, another New Deal project, includes only a brief description of Chelsea (population 2,071). “An area of great fertility,” the author explains, Chelsea was “once the leading wool shipper in the State, as well as one of the largest produce markets, it is now a small manufacturing village.” These histories are symbolically referenced in Fisher’s mural through the spinning wheel, grindstone, fruit trees, wheat, and lumber. Milling remains an important industry for Chelsea.

Chelsea visitors searching for Fisher’s mural today will notice that its home has changed since it was installed in 1938. While it originally adorned the lobby of the 1937 New Deal post office at 200 S. Main Street, in 2009 the oil on canvas painting was carefully removed from the wall by art restorers and reinstalled in the post office’s new location in a strip mall at S. Main Street and Old US Highway 12. (The old post office is now a dentist’s office.) An article on the mural’s move quotes the postmaster explaining that people still come in to take pictures of the mural, demonstrating the ongoing importance of New Deal public art. Fisher’s distinct painting, inspired by a classical style, may look out of place in a gray, impersonal space but its continued presence in a post office lobby speaks to this historical object’s value to the Chelsea community.

Sources

• Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA.
• Cindy Heflin, “Depression-era mural removed for safekeeping as Chelsea post office prepares for move,” M Live, February 4, 2009.