As America celebrates its 250th birthday next year, Cumberland County will place a mural on the Headquarters Library in downtown Fayetteville to mark the county’s history and the American Revolution.
The county Board of Commissioners on April 10 gave preliminary approval to hiring artist Max Dowdle of the NC Public Art firm in Hillsborough. Among seven artists who submitted proposals, Dowdle bid $13,400, according to county documents. The mural project is scheduled for final approval at the commissioners April 21 meeting.
The money is from a $25,600 grant the Cumberland County Public Library received from the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources for activities to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial.
The logo for North Carolina’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Credit: North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
The mural’s theme is “Visions of Freedom, a Gathering of Voices and Common Ground,” Joseph Westendorf, manager of the library’s Local and State History Department, told the commissioners.
Fayetteville’s historic people on mural
Westendorf showed the commissioners a mockup of what the mural will look like. It features soldiers from the Revolutionary War and the 20th century.
There’s also imagery representing the 1960s desegregation protest marchers, books and images of three historic men from Cumberland County.
One of these men is the Marquis de Lafayette of France, the American Revolutionary War general for whom Fayetteville is named. Another is Charles Chesnutt, who was a prominent African American author and whose father, Andrew Chesnutt, was a co-founder of what is now Fayetteville State University.
The third is Lewis S. Leary. Leary was a free Black man from Fayetteville who in 1859 participated in an anti-slavery raid, led by abolitionist John Brown, of a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. (Harper’s Ferry is now in West Virginia.)
County documents say the mural is for the Ray Avenue side of the library, and will be about 25 feet long and 8 feet tall. It’s to be finished no later than June 2026.
Dowdle has painted two other murals in Cumberland County. One unveiled this past November in Spring Lake honors U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers. The other, called “Home of the Airborne,” was unveiled in November 2023 in Spring Lake and celebrates the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.
“One thing that also stood out with this proposal, is that this artist offered to do community engagement work,” Assistant County Manager Faith Phillips told the commissioners. “So have kids come out and do programs, paint days, that type of thing. We thought that for what our mission was as a library.”
Cumberland challenged the king in 1775
While the Fourth of July marks when the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, historians say Cumberland County residents started down that path to independence more than a year prior, in June 1775, when they signed the Liberty Point Resolves.
This document notes the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts between colonists and the British army (considered to be the first battles of the Revolutionary War) and other grievances against Great Britain. The Cumberland County residents said they would meet force with force to defend themselves until Britain and America could reconcile their differences.
A monument in a small park on Bow Street at Person Street in downtown Fayetteville lists on its front and back 55 signers of the Liberty Point Resolves.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
Did you find this story useful or interesting? It was made possible by donations from readers like you to the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so CityView can bring you more news and information like this.
