PETIT JEAN STATE PARK - Two newly found and restored treasures add to the historic legacy and beauty of Petit Jean State Park’s Mather Lodge near Morrilton. But unlike the natural scenic splendor that envelops Petit Jean Mountain, these two are man-made.
Months after the completion of a two-year renovation of the 1930s lodge that returned it to its more historically accurate Adirondack-style decor, a pair of long-lost items from the lodge’s history - two small paintings - have made an unexpected return.
The paintings, measuring about 2 feet by 2 feet each, were created in the late 1930s, soon after the lodge was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) at the state park, which had been established in 1923 and was Arkansas’ first.
After a 75-year absence, the artworks are on display just inside the main lobby’s entrance, to the left of the massive stone fireplace. One, Section of the Lodge, depicts the exterior; the other, View From Lodge, has a sweeping view of the lower Cedar Creek canyon.
The paintings’ long, winding journey started in 1937 when struggling Depression-era artist George Gordon Snyder painted them on construction tile. Snyder, in his 60s, had been accepted into the CCC art program to document the work of the federal program, begun in 1933 with two goals: providing badly needed work for young men and developing conservation projects.
In 1935, Snyder was assigned to the CCC camp at Devil’s Den State Park for two years, then to Petit Jean from January to September 1937, when the artist program was disbanded.
Once completed, these two paintings, like most of Snyder’s work for the CCC, were shipped from Morrilton to Washington. After several years of being stored there, the artwork was thrown into a trash bin amid the mid-20th century renovation of the Department of Agriculture building. Plucked from the trash by a construction worker, the paintings ended up in the worker’s home in Portland, Ore. Decades later, his daughter sold them in an estate sale. The buyer, a Portland art gallery owner, tried to learn more about the artist who signed the paintings and where they were painted.Unsuccessful, he had them conserved and stored for safekeeping. A chance meeting last summer between the gallery owner and a New Jersey CCC art researcher led to the two paintings’ Arkansas homecoming atop Petit Jean Mountain.
“We first learned about the paintings last September and they were returned in October,” says David Caldwell, assistant superintendent at Petit Jean State Park.
Since mid-May, the paintings have been displayed in Mather Lodge across from the lobby’s front desk.
Caldwell says the response from the public has been positive.
“A lot of people have been very interested in them,” he says, adding, “I just like the look of them.”
TIMELESS BEAUTY
“They’re simple paintings but very pretty scenes,” says B.T. Jones, a park interpreter at Petit Jean, adding that the image depicted in the View From Lodge is a timeless one.
“If you go to the right spot, the view is still the same all these years later,” he says. “It hasn’t changed; it’s the same rocks and bluff.”
Caldwell marvels at how the artwork created by Snyder is interwoven with the construction of the lodge.
“This is a park with a lot of history and these paintings are directly tied to it. These logs here,” he says, slapping the rough-hewn walls of locally grown short-leaf pine on which Snyder’s paintings are hung, “were put in place by those CCC guys.”
Built over the course of two years, the lodge is the only CCC-built lodge in the Arkansas state park system. An addition was built in 1941 and the lodge was expanded again in 1960s.
The $4.3 million renovation, completed in May 2012, nearly doubled the 24-room lodge to 11,000-plus square feet, adding a new lobby, gift shop, restaurant and outdoor pool. Other accommodations at the park include 34 cabins and 125 campsites.
Another instance of serendipity is how the leadership of the state park system is also interwoven with the homecoming of Snyder’s art.
When Richard Davies, executive director of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, recently accepted the return of Snyder’s paintings, it was a proud professional moment and a profoundly personal one.
In 1937, his grandfather, Samuel G. Davies, was superintendent of the V-1781 CCC camp at Petit Jean during the artist’s time there. Samuel Davies, who was also the first director of the Arkansas State Parks, sent at least two letters to Washington requesting the return of 10 Snyder paintings.
The outcome of his requests are not known because at the time, the offices administering the CCC art program were in the process of closing and the allocation of artwork was no longer under their direction.
Richard Davies explains the connection between the state parks and national work relief programs.
“The state parks commission contracted with the National Park Service for the CCC program,” he says, adding that the CCC, a New Deal public work relief program, which was operated by the Department of War, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Park Service from 1933 to 1942, was the forerunner to the Works Progress Administration. That public relief program began in 1935 and was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939 and operated until 1943, when it and similar programs ended during World War II.
Workers at the CCC camp at Petit Jean built Mather Lodge, cabins, pavilions, bridges, overlooks and trails and the camp was unusual in that it employed World War I veterans. Only 10 percent of the CCC camps were veterans camps, although most were made up of young men between 17 and 25.
THE ARTIST’S WAY
Within the Civilian Conservation Corps was the program for artists, which didn’t require manual labor and had no age limitations, which is how Snyder, in his 60s, could qualify.
Born in 1873 in Charles City, Iowa, Snyder had worked as a commercial artist and blacksmith before becoming a commercial artist for Marshall Field department stores in Chicago in 1922. But in 1929, the Great Depression loomed and Snyder lost his job.
After building a “house truck,” he traveled with his wife, Carrie, who was from Branson, toward the Ozarks. By 1934 the two were in Hot Springs and he was again unemployed.
He found work that winter with the short-lived New Deal Public Works of Art Project for a few months and created at least three oil paintings during this time. Newcomer was presented to Arkansas Gov. J. Marion Futrell. The Ozark Plowman and The Cross-Cut Saw were shipped to Washington, as all of the artists’ works were. The project ended in 1934 and, finding himself unemployed again, he asked his supervisor, Edward B. Rowan, for a position as a CCC artist.
He was accepted in early 1935 and, like the other artists, was required to re-enroll every six months, working for the next two years at Devil’s Den State Park near West Fork while his wife lived in the house truck near Fayetteville.
In January 1937, Snyder was transferred to the CCC camp at Petit Jean and wrote in a letter to Rowan: “I am very happy to state that here they have provided me with a large room by myself with excellent light. Since being here I have repainted some of the pictures that I had ruined at Devil’s Den.”
In March 1937 he re-enrolled for another six months, but by September, Congress had ceased approving funds for the art program and all the artists were discharged. Snyder wrote to Rowan, thanking him for his help, telling him of plans to locate to Mount Gaylor, establish a garden, raise chickens and sell his paintings to tourists who traveled U.S. 71, which passes over the mountain. Around that time, he sent his final shipment of 21 paintings, along with a list of their titles, to the Treasury Department warehouse in Washington. View From Lodge and Section of the Lodge were among that shipment.
COMING HOME
Davies recounts the connecting link that brought the two paintings back to Arkansas.
“We were contacted out of the blue by Kathleen Duxbury of Ridgewood, N.J., who was doing research on the Civilian Conservation Corps artists and who’d found the two paintings in Oregon while attending a meeting,” he says.
Duxbury, a researcher and author, is gathering information on artists across the nation who were enrolled in the CCC program and has so far identified about 250 of them. She has created a blog sharing her findings at newdealblog.com and is writing a book, Idle Artists of the Great Depression: A Pictorial Record of the CCC. Last summer, she and husband Gardner Yeaw traveled the lower 48 states in a motor home doing research.
“While in Oregon, she met this art dealer who had two of the artist’s works,” Davies says. “The art dealer had purchased them from an estate sale in Portland 16 years earlier from a woman who said her father, who was with a crew working on the restoration of the Department of Agriculture building in the 1950s or 1960s, had salvaged them out of a Dumpster in Washington, D.C.”
The art dealer, Mark Humpal of Portland, recognized Snyder’s work when, during a meeting, Duxbury displayed a slide show that included his oil-on-fiberboard painting Bridge Builders (Bridal Path Bridge), which depicts a scene from Devil’s Den and is in the collection of The Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Upon learning of his paintings’ origins, Humpal entrusted them to Duxbury to return them to Arkansas during her travels.
He also had strong feelings about placing the paintings in Mather Lodge at Petit Jean rather than in an Arkansas museum, which Davies had suggested as an option.
“I believe strongly that placing taxpayer-funded art in taxpayer-funded venues holds to the spirit and intent of our federal art programs of the 1930s,” Humpal says. “Ultimately, the work needs to be seen by the public, and what better way to accomplish that end than to place these two works in the lodge where they will finally be at home.”
Last October in the Civilian Conservation Corps Room at Mather Lodge, Duxbury and Yeaw presented the paintings to Davies and the state of Arkansas.
When asked to fill out a form required of donations, Duxbury responded of Humpal’s actions - “He is not donating or gifting them, he is returning them.”
“When Kathleen told me that my grandfather had attempted to get the paintings returned to the park back in the 1930s, I was pleased to know that at least he tried,” says Davies. “Now, due to no particular effort on our part, at least two of them have landed in our laps. The irony of the whole episode is hard to believe.”
Style, Pages 45 on 06/30/2013