Historical Society Unveils Restored Mural Depicting Plainfield Airmail Pioneer

PLAINFIELD, IL — After about a decade of work, the Plainfield Historical Society unveiled the restored Eddie Gardner mural in its new home at the Plainfield Plaza.

"It's a fabulous piece of art," Society President Michael Lambert told Patch.

Spanning 22 feet long and 5 feet tall, the mural was painted by Harold Hewlett Sr. to showcase Plainfield-born Edward "Eddie" Gardner. Why? He and Max Miller, both pilots, were tasked in the early 1900s with proving that air mail was faster than sending correspondence by train, according to Lambert.

"On Sept. 10, 1918, Eddie Gardner was the first pilot to fly from Chicago to New York in a single day, taking 9 hours and 18 minutes to carry 68 air mail letters," he explained. "With that flight, he was able to prove that mail could be transferred quicker by mail than by train."

Hewlett, a Plainfield resident, was the art director of the Joliet-based Gerlach-Barklow Calendar Company, nationally known for its collectible calendar art. He worked on the mural in 1956-57, and it was unveiled in August 1957.

RELATED: Plainfield Historical Society Moves Headquarters To Plainfield Plaza

About 45 members and friends gathered July 27 at the Historical Society's new location, 15412 S. Route 59, for its annual meeting, where Society updates were shared and the mural was unveiled.

A few guests made the celebration extra special, Lambert said. Linda Hewlett — granddaughter of the muralist, Harold Hewlett Sr. — and her son, Dave Adams, as well as Don and Sharon Kinley, who provided the seed money to kick-start fundraising efforts, helped unveil the restored work of art. Don Kinley is the owner of the Lincoln Way Barber Shop and a retired post office worker, and Sharon Kinley is a longtime Historical Society Board member.

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A brief history of the mural

After the United States Postal Service in August 1957 dedicated a freestanding building on Des Plaines Street — where the Wandering Dragon store sits today — as a post office, Plainfield residents commissioned a mural depicting Gardner.

The post office had it in the lobby until they moved their operations one block south, and the painting was moved out of the public view and hung in the sorting room.

A short while later, the mural "took on a lot of smoke and water damage" after a fire broke out at a building on the corner of Lockport and Des Plaines streets, singeing nearby structures, including the post office, Lambert said. When the post office built its new outpost on Van Dyke Road, the mural also moved but was again hung privately.

A return to the public eye

Around 2008, several Historical Society members "really wanted to get the mural back on public view, and we started talking with officials of the United States Postal Service out in Washington, D.C.," Lambert said. But they hit a roadblock when the agency said the artwork was "federal property and could not be released to the Historical Society because it belonged to the United States."

After several years of negotiating with the U.S. Postal Service and a failed petition drive in 2013, the Society proved the federal government didn't own the mural and that it was wholly paid for by residents of Plainfield. How? The Society documented that the mural was painted and unveiled during a timeframe when the government didn't have a federal art program — between World War II and the early 1960s, when Kennedy reinstated an art program, Lambert said.

"The federal postal service said the Historical Society could have it, with two conditions: that we would restore it and that it would be put on public view," he said.

In August 2020, historians removed the mural from the post office, sent it to professional art conservators and raised the roughly $29,000 needed for the restoration.