Who Painted the Post Office Mural?

When I pick up my mail at the Doylestown post office, I pass by the mural on the back wall of the postal box area. There is no sign explaining who painted the mural and what it represents. What can you tell me about it? - W.D., Doylestown.

During the Depression, the federal government sought to boost the economy through public works, ranging from massive dams to local post offices.

Doylestown had outgrown its post office, located on East State Street at Printer's Alley. In 1934, a new post office was built at South Main and West Ashland streets.

A New Deal program, administered by the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture, commissioned artists to create murals and sculpture for post offices and some other federal buildings. This was separate from the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which sponsored a wide variety of artwork in public buildings such as schools, libraries and city halls.

Charles Child, a 35-year-old artist who lived in Lumberville, was selected to create a mural for the Doylestown office in 1937.

Child had been art editor of "The Lampoon" while attending Harvard University. He spent five years traveling and studying art in Europe and Asia.

During his versatile career, Child was known for painting portraits and landscapes, illustrating adult and children's books, creating decorative screens and panels for private homes, and designing rugs and fabrics.

For his mural, Child chose to depict the founders of Bucks County and Doylestown. He explained his approach in a February 1937 letter to the assistant superintendent of the Section of Painting and Sculpture.

"So you can see that the kind of people that will come in to the Post office and see this decoration are practically all solid small farming folk: dairymen, orchardists, egg men, with a scattering of the merchants and professionals always found in a county seat. I feel that people of this kind would possibly resent anything but a thoroughly realistic approach in a mural," Child wrote from "Coppernose," his Lumberville home.

Child completed the mural in November 1937.

"When patrons of the post office in Doylestown enter the lobby Monday morning they will find over the door leading to the office of Postmaster Francis J. Fonash a beautiful oil painting, the work of Charles Child, of Lumberville," the Doylestown Daily Intelligencer reported.

The mural, 11 feet wide and 4 feet high, is divided into a 6-foot-wide center panel flanked by two smaller panels.

The main section is labeled "William Markham Purchases Bucks County Territory July 15, 1682." William Penn, who was granted the charter for Pennsylvania by King Charles II in 1681, made his cousin William Markham deputy governor of the province. Markham acted as Penn's representative until Penn sailed from England and arrived in the colony in October 1682.

Markham and two other Englishmen are shown trading with three Lenni Lenape Indians, who inhabited what became Bucks County. "The territory was bought by the Whites for two kettles, some fish hooks, blankets and a few hatchets, all of which are shown in the painting," the Intelligencer reported.

Doylestown founders Clement and William Doyle are shown standing in the left and right panels, respectively, dressed in buckskin, wearing coonskin caps and holding long rifles vertically.

Clement Doyle was a son of Edward and Rebecca Doyle, who settled along the Delaware River in Bucks County in 1692. Clement built his home in the vicinity of the crossroads where the primitive highway from the Schuylkill to the Delaware rivers (today's Norristown to New Hope) intersected with the main road from Philadelphia to Easton.

Clement's brother, Edward Jr., bought 150 acres at the crossroads in 1730 from Joseph Kirkbride, and another 42 acres in 1737.

In 1745, Edward Jr.'s son, William Doyle, obtained a license to open a tavern at the intersection, approximately where the Fountain House stands today. The settlement was first called "Doyle's Tavern" and later became known as "Doylestown."

The mural remained in the post office on South Main Street until 1985, when a new post office opened on Atkinson Drive. The painting was removed and installed in the new location, on the wall behind the stamp window.

When the post office was renovated and enlarged in 1998, workers discovered the mural had been glued to the wall. The entire wall, including the mural, was removed and stored in the postmaster's office.

A company restored the mural, but it could not be returned to its former location behind the stamp window. Instead, the mural was installed in 2001 on the rear wall of the box area, behind a sheet of protective glass.

The Doylestown painting was one of four Depression-era murals painted in Bucks County post offices. The other murals were "Carrying the Mail" in Sellersville, "Quaker Settlers" in Quakertown and "Canal Era" in Morrisville. The 1930s Quakertown and Morrisville post offices were sold decades later and now house private businesses, but the Sellersville post office remains on Main Street.

Nationwide, about 1,200 murals and 300 sculptures, primarily in post offices, were commissioned by the federal government from 1934 to 1943. Pennsylvania originally had 88 postal works of art, second only to New York.

Child's art career branched out in new directions. He and his wife, Fredericka, were among the original investors in the Bucks County Playhouse when it opened in New Hope in 1939, and he painted the theater's stage curtain.

In 1942, Child was named director of the art and music section of the cultural board of the State Department. He later became an advisor on the arts and humanities and helped develop a cultural exchange program.

He wrote and illustrated a 1965 memoir, "Roots in the Rock," about life at his summer home in Maine. Child's artworks were shown in a number of exhibitions over the years, including the Woodmere Art Gallery in Philadelphia in 1970 and Phillips Mill in Solebury in 1979.

Child, whose twin brother, Paul, was married to famed television chef Julia Child, died in 1983 at age 81.