When Cotton was King - Buckholts, TX
Posted by: 
WalksfarTX
N 30° 52.448 W 097° 07.500
14R E 679248 N 3417158
One hundred and thirty-three volunteers rolled, brushed and swirled paint onto the Buckholts Community Center’s east wall to create a historically accurate and personalized mural of this small town outside Temple.
Waymark Code: WMYC2Q
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 05/27/2018
Views: 1
Texas Co-Op Power
The mural, 25 feet tall by 80 feet wide, covers almost the entire wall and preserves the memory of a time when cotton was king and the railroad put Buckholts on the map more than 130 years ago. Painted on the left, a Santa Fe Railway engine pulling a coal car chugs up to the train station where townspeople and a tiny black and tan dog loiter on the platform. The distant landscape unfolds into rolling green hills, patched with fields of corn, cotton and hay and dotted by a red farmhouse, white church and a windmill. In the foreground, native plants, wildlife and cattle abound. Residents till their land and pile cotton and hay into overflowing wooden trailers.
Centered at the bottom of the mural—below a 9-foot-tall Texas silhouette with Buckholts’ location marked with a white star—reads this credit, in cursive and capital letters: Painted by friends of this community; Designed by Lamerle Zajicek.
After making stencils and patterns based on historic images using a 1-inch to 1-foot scale, Zajicek and 133 volunteers—about 120 of them residents of Buckholts—started to paint. The mural took four years to complete.