Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Plymouth: The Location

The exterior of the old Plymouth post office, now Westborn Market. Photo by Madeleine Aquilina.

Lopez’s mural shows the stagecoach line that stopped in Plymouth on its way from Detroit to Ann Arbor in the early nineteenth century. Stagecoach lines were an essential mechanism of settler colonialism in Michigan, facilitating the movement of people, food, goods, and as Lopez illustrates, mail and newspapers, too. As these routes that ameliorated the comfortability of settler life stretched westward in southern Michigan in the 1820s and 1830s, so did the violent displacement of Potowatomi communities, a process that heightened following the passing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and the signing of the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. You can learn about the history of Potowatomi displacement from the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.

The stagecoach lines that Lopez painted in Plymouth Trail were replaced in the 1870s with the construction of the rail lines that likewise so fascinated the artist. Following the town becoming a key crossroads in Michigan’s rail system, its primary economy shifted from the fields of wheat and grist-mills it had been home to since the 1820s to become the center of air-gun manufacturing by two companies–Daisy Manufacturing and the Markham Air Rifle company. In addition to these two plants, as stated in a 1925 atlas of Detroit and Wayne County, “two foundries, a structural steel fabricating plant, a cigar factory, toy plant, and ice plant may also be added to the list of thriving industries that are established at Plymouth.”

Lopez’s mural in Westborn Market. Photographed by Madeleine Aquilina in October 2021. Photo by Madeleine Aquilina.

The Plymouth post office at 860 Penniman Avenue, built just two years prior to Lopez’s painting of Plymouth Trail, moved in the early 2010s to a location across the street. A local grocery store chain, Westborn Market, purchased the post office building in 2014 and retained many of the lobby’s original features, including Plymouth Trail, through renovations. The mural was restored and visitors to the grocery store can still see Lopez’s fresco panels in a variation on their original environment. To read more about the architecture of the Plymouth post office and its context as the site of Lopez’s mural and as one of many post offices across the United States built by the Treasury Department using New Deal funds, see Madeleine’s Aquilina’s essay, “Post Office Architecture & The Treasury Department.”