Gwen B. Giles Station Post Office Mural – St. Louis MO

Description

The historic Gwen B. Giles Station post office—also known as Wellston Station (prior to a Congressional renaming)—in St. Louis, Missouri contains a 1939 Section of Fine Arts mural by Lumen Winter entitled “Old Levee and Market at St. Louis.”

The mural depicts a view of the St. Louis levee to the right with a steamboat and the market to the left in the background. There are contrasting groupings in the foreground with a family hurrying to get out of the way of the stagecoach which the driver is attempting to slow despite the wildness of the black horse. By contrast, the two gentlemen to the right are rather nonchalant, standing beneath a tree with a sign showing that they are on the Boone’s Lick Trail and 16 miles to St. Charles. The trail continued into the western part of mid-Missouri across the river from the historic town of Arrow Rock.

Lumen Winter was born in 1908 in Ellery, New York, but was raised in Larned in western Kansas. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art and the National Academy of Design in New York City and settled in Santa Fe, NM. He was best known for his murals, completing the mural in the Hutchinson, KS Post Office, also. He designed the mural and official medallion for the Apollo 13 mission and the series of murals in the Kansas State Capitol. He died 1982 in New Rochelle, NY.

There is another mural by Winter in Hutchinson, KS.