The Post Office, and What the Painter Put in the Middle

The date is cut into the front of the building: 1936.

The year after, the Treasury Department's Section sent Paul Rohland to paint a mural inside it. He called it The Union of the Mountains, and the title is the whole argument: he turned down the town's industry as a subject, writing that he “was not particularly interested in industrial turmoil as a decorative idea”, and painted instead the two mountains the town is named for. The industry is still in there, though, and it is what a local eye goes to first — Harbison-Walker's smokestacks, and beside them a clearing on the mountainside that is a tract of company housing. Along the left stand three churches: a red Catholic one, a tan Methodist one, and a Greek Orthodox one with an onion dome, which is the immigrant town painted without comment.

Fifteen years later the company tore every one of those houses down. The painting is still on the wall.

Checked 2026-08-30 · Historic Mount Union collection

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