The Writing on the Wall: Treasury Section Murals in New Deal Louisiana

Abstract

Up in Bienville Parish, through piney hills rolling toward the Ozarks, the road winds down a sweeping curve, rises abruptly, and enters Arcadia, Louisiana. Main Street parallels an abandoned railroad spur and runs along eighty yards of brick-faced storefronts. The usual concerns flourish: a flower shop, an insurance agency, the pharmacy, and a secondhand furniture store. There is also a Baptist revival hall, but people point it out for another reason. Years before it was a house of the Lord, the building was a home for the dead, a funeral parlor, and as such, briefly, the focal point of national attention. That was in 1934 when, shortly after the sheriff sprang his trap, the corpses of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were fetched back to town and propped on slabs leaning in the undertaker's window. Tellers of the tale usually smile at the irony, but it is not the only one Arcadians can claim. Across the street and down the block from the morguecumrevival hall stands a United States post office built during the Great Depression. It conforms to the standard floor plan then in vogue, and at one end of the main hall, over the postman's door, hangs a mural whose warm pastels depict an abundant cotton harvest. Black pickers dot the field, sacks filled to bursting. A white driver crests the hill in a wagon brimming over with the yield and descends a road leading toward the mill. Surrounding hills stretch beyond (Figure 1).