Restoring Harmony: Artist restores 50-year-old mural in tiny North Coast town
Depending on the weather, an artist soon will return to the tiny North Coast town of Harmony to finish restoring a mural that’s been on the outside wall of a former creamery building there for about 50 years.
That’s also about how long Pasadena artist Phillip Aguirre has been visiting the area, he said in a recent phone interview.
Aguirre lived in Baywood Park from 1978 through 1988. He recalls Harmony visits during that period, “when there was music, great jazz, a restaurant.”
He’s hopeful that vibrancy will return to the community under the direction of Alan and Rebecca Vander Horst, who bought the one-block commercial burg in 2014 and have gradually been renovating it ever since.
How Aguirre got the art restoration job is a typical Harmony tale of resourcefulness, timing and happenstance.
He asked.
Aguirre, who specializes in restoring paintings all around the world, stopped in Harmony again in mid-2019 and saw how faded and cracked the mural was, how drastically it had deteriorated through the decades.
“You couldn’t really even see the mural anymore,” he said.
So when Aguirre spotted a door with a sign on it that said “manager” on it, he knocked.
When Aarika Wells, longtime Harmony manager, answered that door, he told her that if the management was “ever in need of having the mural restored” they could contact him, he said. “I never really expected to hear anything more.”
But much to his surprise, Aguirre said, “about a month and a half later, I got a call, asking ‘When can you start?’ ”
What is ‘The Town of Harmony’ mural?
The mural was created by noted artist Robert Brooks in the 1970s.
Covering a full wall, the mural is topped with a depiction of the one-block town of Harmony bisected by the rural roadway and framed by green hills. The oval-framed scene includes the creamery building, the pottery-shop structure, the chapel and the large residence for management.
Below, Brooks’ version of the history of the town is written in cursive script on a pale green, unrolled scroll. But while history remains static, people’s memories of it differ, which is why the mural’s tale is now referred to as a legend.
The mural was likely commissioned by Paul Fields and Ralph Casper, who had bought the agricultural land in 1970 from the Harmony Valley Creamery Association, according to “Living in Harmony: The School, Creamery and Town” by area historian Debbie Soto.
Harmony manager Wells said Fields and Casper fought local and county opposition for three years to get the ag land rezoned to commercial. Once they got it, they began creating the tiny downtown area that the Vander Horsts are restoring.
One of the town’s first tenants, John Schoenstein’s Harmony Pottery shop, has been there since 1973.
Artist works to restore mural
In mid-November, Aguirre and his assistant, wife, Mary Aguirre, got a head start on restoring the mural, but then the rain and previous commitments interrupted.
While the mural already looks much better now than it did before the Aguirres did the initial restoration, Wells said, there’s still more work to do.
The artist hopes to return in early January and resume working, weather permitting. He expects the Harmony job will take at least two more weeks.
“My plan is to build that finish back up, like a fresco, so it will last longer,” he said, noting that the process is done in layers. “I just need four days between each layer to let all my colors hold fast, for a marriage of the colors. Then I’ll go over it with varnish. I want it to last at least another 50 years.”
After all, the Aguirres plan to see the mural often in the future. They intend to get out of the Southern California rat race soon by moving to Cambria’s Marine Terrace area.
“When we started painting, people would tell us, ‘Oh, I always stop here.’ It’s a great place to get grounded,” Phillip Aguirre said. “I agree.”
Will he retire? Not likely. He’ll continue with his insurance restoration work; demand has been booming lately because so many artworks have been badly damaged in wildfires.
Is mural history, legend or both?
It’s assumed that Brooks intended his mural to be a historical account of how Harmony was established, grew and got its name.
According to his mural, the town “grew up around a dairy founded in 1869. Until 1907, the creamery changed hands several times.”
“In these early days,” the legend reads, “rivalries and feuding among the dairy farmers caused chaos in the valley. After on shooting death, a truce was called. All agreed to live henceforth in harmony, and from this the name of the town was derived.”
According more recent research done by Soto and historian-archivist Melody Coe, that’s not quite how the town got her name.
Soto said that, yes, there were conflicts, but the murder was a stabbing in Morro Bay brought on by a family clash in Harmony.
She also says the Harmony name originated with an 1875 petition to county supervisors asking to name the area’s new one-room school and the district it served Harmony, perhaps to help put an end to the competitive quarreling.
However, Coe said the name selection “was based on spirituality … had no violence connected to it at all, and the term was used in the 1860s by very harmonious neighbors.”
She said she’ll reveal her latest discoveries in a presentation for the Cambria Historical Society, likely this spring.
The mural also discusses the creation and history of the Harmony Valley Cooperative Dairy, which closed in the late 1950s, as well as high-profile visits by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst — misspelled as “William Randolf Hearst” — and his celebrity guests, Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri.
“Restoration (of the town) began in 1972, with loving care to bring back the beauty and vitality of the Harmony of years ago,” the mural says.
According to Coe, Soto and Wells, the tale depicted on the Harmony mural has proven to be part slightly wobbly history and part local legend.
The accounts in Soto’s 2015 book differ somewhat from the mural’s version and Coe’s. But Soto agreed that a 50-year-old artwork deserves to be respected, repaired and retained — including some of the errors — just as it was when Brooks created it in the 1970s.
However, Wells said that some misspellings such as Hearst’s name will be fixed.
