History Comes Alive in Town Hall Mural

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then artist Walter Korder wrote his War and Peace on the walls of West Hartford Town Hall.

His 1,000 square foot mural covers all four walls of Room 312 and chronicles main events in the history of Connecticut and throughout the New England area.

“It’s a magnificent piece of art and it’s educational,” said West Hartford Mayor Scott Slifka. “You go to Congress and they have art of this magnitude and they treat it with great reverence. We do that here on the local level too since we don’t have an abundance of it.”

Korder completed the masterpiece in 1941 in what was originally a library when the building was known as Hall High School. The stunning detail and vibrant colors preserve a history that dates back to the Red Paint Man of Maine and the Algonquin Indians.

“It represents things that are not always represented,” Slifka said. “He was doing this in the 1930s which was a time when most people weren’t recognizing the fact that Native Americans were here first.”

The timeline pushes on to 1000 A.D. when Leif the Lucky – also known as Leif Ericson – landed in North America. Other main events such as the founding of Hartford in 1636 by Reverend Thomas Hooker and the American Revolutionary War come to life on the panels.

The mural ends in 1859 with the death of radical abolitionist John Brown and the prophecy of a Civil War.

Along the top of each section is a running narrative explaining what you are looking at in no more than a sentence.

“It’s interactive,” Slifka said. “We get a lot of Boy Scout, Cub Scout, and Girl Scout troops that come to look at the mural and they can basically just learn themselves.”

The project took Korder four years to complete, starting in 1937 and ending in 1941. Funding for the project was cut in 1939 when only 750 square feet were completed. There is no record that Korder was paid for the remaining 250 square feet.

“I was in high school when he was working on them,” said Korder’s daughter-in-law Louise Korder, who visited Town Hall this on Saturday and viewed the murals. “And I’d walk in and see him up on a step ladder working away.”

Other works by Walter Korder pepper the Hartford landscape including his 14 stations of the cross at the St. Augustine’s Church on Maple Avenue and portraits of American and English writers that hang in the library of Michael D. Fox Elementary School.