City's murals capture community's pride in past
By SHANNON CRABTREE

Mural Artist Dayton Wodrich created many of the historical works decorating El Campo buildings. A mural tour can be found at www.elcampochamber.com/murals.htm.

El Campo's tall tales cling firmly to the same bricks, mortar and steel which have stiffened backs and callused hands in the not-quite cowtown community since the early 1900s.

So it's not surprising that the Pearl of the Prairie's almost 20 murals call a World War II veteran Mom.

Maybe that's why there's more grit than glitz in the larger-than-life paintings.

El Campo's always been a working town - its very name (Spanish for field) is courtesy of the black soil which gave riches only to those who withstood the blowing wind, baking sun and occasional deluge behind horse-drawn plows and plain hard work.

Even then, it was only those coming from afar who noticed the luster - who commented again and again that the community shone like a pearl on the South Texas prairie.

Decades worth of farmers, shopkeepers and hard-working laborers hadn't yet heard Navy WAVE Ann Leach Chewning's battle cry of "Bloom Where You're Planted" which has made the city grow.

They simply lived it - planting roots and plowing fields on the prairie.

Many of their grandchildren still perform the same tasks - thanking modern technology's ability to spare them some of the blisters - although computers have yet to capture courage or a connection to the land in just a few keystrokes.

It took a Canadian holiday and a hard-working woman's conviction to ensure all would see the better times that blisters brought.

"My husband Bo Chewning and I were traveling Canada (where they discovered the town of Welland and its murals)," Leach said. "We heard the town was fast going to pot - so to reverse it the town decided to hire professional artists to paint murals.

"I thought how wonderful it would be to put our history on the walls," Leach said in a June 2006 interview in the El Campo Leader-News.

Returning to El Campo, she worked with an artist to develop nine sketches capturing field hands and dreams of prosperity in the rich farmland. "We sold six of them the first day," Leach said.

For her efforts, Leach was honored as the 1997 El Campo Citizen of the Year.

"A rice farmer told me, 'Ann, this is an ag town, people don't expect it to be pretty'," she said in her acceptance speech. "But who lives in the prettiest houses in town - rice farmers."

So Leach put agriculture up on the walls. And somehow, it's picture perfect.

"It's a big draw," said El Campo Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture President Becca Socha. "People here take for granted what El Campo has to offer, but visitors are amazed what this small community can do."