Grand Ledge: The Location
The Federal Writers’ Project guide to Michigan, published in 1941, primarily describes the city of Grand Ledge (population 3,572) through its natural features, namely the eponymous sandstone ledges and the Grand River. Those features are absent in Calder’s mural but we know from his correspondence with the Section of Fine Arts and newspaper clippings published after installation that the Michigan artist was careful to include local specificity. The industrial buildings and water tower on the horizon are an intentional depiction of the Grand Ledge skyline and the produce in the carts and baskets in the foreground reference local crops. Like all of the New Deal murals that featured rural agricultural abundance, the scene that Calder imagined was facilitated by Indigenous dispossession. The Euro-American settlement of Grand Ledge on Anishinaabe land was premised on the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.
Calder’s mural is one of many Michigan murals remaining in its original location in a still-operating post office lobby. In Grand Ledge, the brick building was constructed in 1939 in a standard small post office style, with a concrete face featuring the city’s name and three stylized wheat stalks.
Sources
- Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA.
- “The 1819 Treaty of Saginaw,” Central Michigan University Libraries, accessed May 9, 2023, https://blogs.cmich.edu/library/2019/11/26/the-1819-treaty-of-saginaw/#:~:text=In%20the%201819%20treaty%2C%20the,living%20on%20the%20ceded%20territory.
