If you look up at the Seehafer Ace Hardware store on Main Street in Milbank, you can see back 124 years. A high school class, with the help of an artist in residence has created a mural depicting the community’s history from the pioneers, the railroads, and into today.
It’s a quiet Saturday afternoon in Milbank. The sky is overcast, and about ready to burst open with a spring rainstorm. A few cars pass through Main Street. On the east side of the road, Wally Runge has just stepped out of his car. But before crossing the street for his errand, he stands for a bit and takes in the new mural. The 48 feet by six feet painting hosts images important to Milbank’s history and culture: baseball, corn stalks and a dairy farm, the National Guard unit, the windmill, and the cheese factory, past and present.
“It’s beautiful,” Runge says. “I worked for the cheese factory for 36 years, so I enjoy looking at where they started out and the way they are today.”
The mural project is made possible thanks to a grant from the South Dakota Arts Council. It allowed Markus Tracy, an artist from Henderson, Nevada to spend a month in Milbank working with high school students. He says there’s a longstanding tradition of using murals to portray history. It’s not simply a painting, it’s visual storytelling. He hopes it makes people think about their own stories.
“People stop and they look and they really start reflecting,” Tracy says. “And it’s nice to know that when people start reflecting they spend a moment breaking away from their daily routine into talking about who they are, where they belong in this community, and hopefully offers them a sense of celebration about Milbank. And maybe the sense of celebration might reinvent itself in creating other opportunities and shared ideas and dialogues between people who live here.”
The mural was developed and created by students and staff like Nancy Pauli, the Art Instructor at Milbank High School. She teaches a mural class at MHS, and this is their latest project. She says the first step was research, directed by students with the help of books, the internet, and the Grant County Historical Museum.
“The students, as they started unfolding information, they kind of told us what they wanted in the mural, what was most important to them,” Pauli says. “And we kind of took the top ideas that the majority of them came up with. We had more ideas that we couldn’t even begin to fit in that mural. But it was really exciting to see the kids go into that museum and open the books and start looking at information and looking at the pictures and asking questions. It was wonderful.”
Pauli says it was also exciting to see the kids grow through the painting process.
“I saw kids come out and paint that I never would have imagined in a million years,” Pauli says. “It gave them an opportunity to open up and try something, and they really liked it. And I saw different things from the kids than I’ve ever expected. So it was wonderful on both sides. I got to see kids in a whole new light that I had never expected and I’m hoping they saw themselves in a new light also.”
Pauli’s favorite piece of the mural is Henrietta Baxter, who sold her homestead to the railroad company, and became Milbank’s first resident. The railroad plays a large part in Milbank’s history and culture. On the painting, an orange and black engine pulls a green and yellow train car.
“We put the train in there because the kids remembered the train fest we used to have,” Pauli says. “And everybody remembered the robbers that would come on the train and all the little kids would cry, it was great. They all remember it being fun. So we put the bank robber on top of the train. We decided that he would be a good symbol for also the war we had between Big Stone in Grant County, trying to keep the county seat here. We had the county seat and Big Stone would come and take it from us, all the paperwork that made it a county seat, and then we’d go back and get it and we finally won. My grandpa always said there were shots fired, but nobody was shot.”
Pauli plans on continuing the mural class next year. She says the students are painting the hallways of the school. She’d also like to start painting the boarded up windows downtown. Markus Tracy says he’s worked on similar projects in his home state. He says it’s one way for art to serve a functional purpose.
“There are ways to plug in, so to speak, art, to make it accessible for people to view and to beautify your community and talk about your history and create a discussion,” Tracy says. “It’s quite a beautiful way that now, you can say that art has a function. Rather than an aesthetic quality where you just go to the museum or gallery with four white walls, it’s now outside. It’s exposed for people to see, to find, to discover.”
Milbank’s first community mural isn’t quite finished yet. Eventually viewers will have the option to scan QR codes on the window of the hardware store just below the painting, and learn more about the people and places featured in the mural, as well as the process of creating this kind of artwork. It’s a way of extending this visual story even further.