Post Office Murals – West Palm Beach FL

Description

“In 1939 the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts contracted Dohanos to paint six murals depicting the “Legend of James Edward Hamilton, Mail Carrier” in the West Palm Beach, Florida Post Office.  Hamilton was one of the “barefoot mailmen,” letter carriers who worked a remote stretch of rural Florida in the 1880s – a 68-mile roadless and part-by-boat route from Palm Beach to Miami, much of it by beach walking.  The round trip of 136 miles from Palm Beach to Miami and back took six days.  Hamilton mysteriously disappeared on the route, either drowned, taken by alligator, or some say, murdered.  In conducting his work on the murals, Dohanos corresponded with Charles W. Pierce, postmaster in Boynton Beach, Florida who had also been one of the carriers on the “barefoot route,” which ended in 1892 after a rough road was installed.  Pierce first used the term “barefoot mailman” in conversation with Dohanos, the term then applied to the murals Dohanos produced.  In 1943, the novel, The Barefoot Mailman, by Theodore Pratt, was based on the story of James Hamilton, and a film followed in 1951 starring Robert Cummings and others.  Some of the studies for the Dohanos post office wall murals are now in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and have also been displayed at the Library of Congress.”

(www.pophistorydig.com)

The murals now hang in the new West Palm Beach post office on Summit Blvd.