Auburn Post Office Mural

Magafan won Auburn on the strength of a design she had entered in a Kansas mural competition, and the Treasury's Section of Fine Arts offered her the commission in July 1937 for $620, paid in thirds. She visited, sketched the countryside and proposed a threshing scene. The 13-by-4-foot oil, titled Threshing, was hung in early June 1938 with help from her twin sister Jenne and Edward Chavez. An Auburn art class wrote that the old threshing machine was going out of use and that the mural might someday be as popular as Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers.

What the plaque says

Auburn Post Office Mural During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal created government programs to counter the effects of the Great Depression. Hundreds of post offices were built and the U.S. Treasury commissioned art for many of them. Twelve Nebraska post offices were selected to receive murals. Ethel Magafan, the artist for the Auburn project, chose a theme depicting local agriculture. The canvas was installed in the post office lobby in 1938. The post office is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Nemaha County Lodging Tax Nebraska State Historical Society, 2013

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brownville — 9.6 mi
  A Missouri River town of 1854 that bet on a railroad and lost, kept its arts through the decline, and now has Nebraska's oldest repertory theatre and a 1932 steam dredge on the bank.
• Indian Cave State Park — 20 mi
  Wooded Missouri River bluffs in the old Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation, with carvings of animals cut into a sandstone shelter, the ghost town of St. Deroin and miles of trail.
• Arbor Lodge State Historical Park — 20 mi
  J. Sterling Morton's estate in Nebraska City, a four-room house of 1855 grown to 52 rooms among the trees he planted, home of the man who proposed Arbor Day in 1872.

More markers nearby

• Nemaha County Courthouse — 0.5 mi
• Half-Breed Tract — 0.9 mi
• Peru State College — 8.0 mi
• French Settlement of Julian — 9.2 mi