• Electric Distribution Improvements - Okolona MS
    Okolona obtained electric power in 1935 through the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Funding to extend the municipal power system into the surrounding rural area was approved by PWA 9/25/1935. Project 1139 for a loan of $21,000 and grant of $17,042 was begun 3/9/1936 and completed 2/25/1937 for a total of $38,860.
  • Post Office - Okolona MS
    This post office was constructed by the Treasury Department in 1937. It briefly contained a New Deal mural painted by Harold Egan.    
  • Post Office Mural - Okolona MS
    Harold Egan's "The Richness of the Soil" was completed in 1939 for the Okolona, Mississippi post office. It was ordered painted over by the postmaster within days of its installation, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but most likely, related to the elements of modernism in the mural. Egan's work was not the typical realism or regionalism favored by the South in post office murals. Undocumented, but commonly accepted, reasons also include that the "female figure was too risqué for the 1930s" and that the "scantily clad woman was not well received." However, Mark Clinton Davis of the Pearl River...