Senior Dining Hall Mural Restoration

Though we have standard Service Weekend projects (wood burning name tags, cutting team ties, sweeping cabins), we often complete a unique task. One year, we finished restoring the mural in the Senior Dining Hall, a piece of history that every camper remembers. 

In 1934, the Valkyrie team gift to Camp was Masonite panels on which counselor Edith “Ely” Mahier drew a panorama depicting Valkyrie Rock on one end and Amazon Rock on the other. In addition to the lake, cabins and key buildings, she included Colonel Rice, Annie Hayes and Mrs. Martin. Along the lower edge, Ely added native Tennessee plants and wildflowers. She selected Senior campers to help fill in the colors. They spent weeks painting the mural and were allowed to sign their names. When the old Dining Hall was replaced, Ely’s mural was carefully saved and installed in the building we know today. 

Ely’s Mural Restored: Fast forward to 1979-80, a gap year I spent at Nakanawa while my husband Jack finished a master’s degree at Tennessee Tech. One project on Mitch’s list was a restoration of Ely’s mural. Its colors had faded over the decades in the weather. Working in mittens during wintry months, I retraced Eli’s outlines and added back bright camp colors. The scenes came to life with white-white shirts, true red and blue ties, green canoes and colorful details. I added a legend to record a bit of the history. 

Service Weekends Matter! 2010 provides an example of a particularly worthwhile Service Weekend for our mural. Across the bottom of the panels, the Tennessee plants and flowers, along with the artists’ names, had also faded beyond recognition. A group of artistic Service Weekend volunteers repainted the Tennessee flora I had come to know and proved their sleuthing skills on missing artists’ names. 

Nakanawa catalogs from the 1930s helped us “break the code.”  We made a list of fragments we could decipher: “First name starts with G or C and ends in a T! Last name ends in LY!” We cheered as we solved the puzzle, identifying and repainting every name, including that of Elisabeth Mitchell, a camper at the time of the mural’s creation.

One July Reunion Weekend years later, I noticed an older Nakanawa alumna studying the mural. Her mother had helped paint it, and she hoped to find her name. Sure enough, there it was, bright and clear!  She took a photo of the mural and a close-up of her mother’s name. That encounter shows how Service Weekends matter. 

– Margaret Matens