BGuthrie Photos: MD -- Silver Spring -- Ellsworth Library (8901 Colesville Rd)

MD -- Silver Spring -- Ellsworth Library (8901 Colesville Rd):

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: Included here are pictures of "The Old Tavern", a WPA-vintage mural that used to be in the post office. It was later moved to the new Silver Spring library.

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underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
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[1] SSLELL_090213_06.JPG	[2] SSLELL_090213_18.JPG	[3] SSLELL_090213_27.JPG
[4] SSLELL_090213_30.JPG	[5] SSLELL_090213_39.JPG	[6] SSLELL_090213_46.JPG
[7] SSLELL_090213_56.JPG	[8] SSLELL_090213_62.JPG	[9] SSLELL_090213_76.JPG
[10] SSLELL_090213_84.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SSLELL_090213_06.JPG: This is the old Silver Spring library ("Silver Spring Branch Library") located on Colesville Road near Dale Drive. It was closed in 2015 in preparation for the opening of the new one downtown.
2. SSLELL_090213_18.JPG: From http://www.wpamurals.com/SilverSp.pdf "The Old Tavern" Mural at the Silver Spring Library By Jerry McCoy This mural was the result of a unique government project sponsored by the United States Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture, in existence between 1934 and 1943. During this period, artwork was commissioned for over 1,100 post offices that were being constructed. The philosophy behind the project was that Americans could learn more about their culture and history through public art, and the community post office was deemed the ideal showcase for this work. "The Old Tavern," an oil-on-canvas painting, approximately six by sixteen feet, was commissioned in 1937 for the new post office located at 8412 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring. The mural depicts Civil War Union soldiers (circa 1864-65) reading their mail and relaxing in front of the Eagle Inn, which stood on the southwest corner of present day Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road in the village of what was then called "Sligo." Inclusion of the central figure of the young African-American soldier was intended by the artist to "symbolize the result of the Civil War -- namely the liberation of his race." Nicolai Cikovsky (1894-1984), the artist of the mural, was a Russian immigrant who was well regarded as a muralist, painter, lithographer, and teacher (Corcoran School of Art). In addition to the Silver Spring Post Office mural, he completed commissions for the Towson, Maryland post office, as well as the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. His works can also be found in the National Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1981 the United States Postal Service vacated their building at 8412 Georgia Avenue and moved to a new and larger facility on Second Avenue in Silver Spring. The mural remained in the building until 1991 when the structure was sold. At that time the mural was removed and placed in storage because there was no room to publicly display it at the new post office. Newly restored, the mural will be displayed at the Silver Spring Library indefinitely, and will continue its nearly six-decade old purpose of teaching the public not only American history, but the history of Silver Spring.
3. SSLELL_090213_46.JPG: "Nicolai Cikovsky" signature on the mural
4. SSLELL_090213_56.JPG: "Lion", by Marcia F. Billig, 1990.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].