Thursday, September 26, 2024
Clint Tunnell bought a building on the Comanche square in 2019. It had been empty for years and was in bad shape. He decided to gut the building and start the remodeling process. While power washing a stucco wall, a piece of the stucco came loose revealing a brick wall. “I knew it was red brick behind the stucco but I noticed the bricks were painted black. I thought there might be an advertising sign or something behind the stucco.”
Clint and some helpers spent two days carefully chipping away at the stucco on that brick wall. “And I started down at the floor, and after we got about three feet high, we uncovered the tail and hind leg of a cow, so we knew we had something. Finally, we uncovered the word tobacco, so we just started working our way up the wall. We uncovered an 18 x 18 original Bull Durham Tobacco mural from 1893.”
Clint has done a lot of research on the Durham Tobacco Company that was headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. It was owned by W.T. Blackwell. “He apparently was some kind of a genius,” says Clint. “He would walk around at night and pick up tobacco wrappers off the ground, and he would take them home and count them to see who was winning the sales in tobacco out there, and he realized he was losing. He came up with this outdoor advertising scheme well before Coca Cola or Good Morning Coffee or whatever else there was. This is how he increased his sales of tobacco. He commissioned four artists, and they painted them all across the United States. There were some over in China and across the oceans. These murals were painted from 1869 up until the 1920s. We were told by the people in Durham that this is probably the only original Bull Durham mural in Texas that’s still intact.”
He says the mural reflects several areas of history. “It’s great art history, it’s great agriculture history, it’s great outdoor advertising history, local history, national history; there’s so much tied to just that one sign.”
Clint put a photo of the mural on Facebook, and it became a tourist attraction. People from all over the country go to Comanche to see it. “We ended up making the front of this building pretty much full glass. We keep all the lights on at night so people can look in and see the sign.”
The building houses offices of their landscaping, real estate, and insurance businesses. They also lease office space. “We wondered how we could have our offices and still preserve the historical integrity of the building.” He ended up building an 1890s farmhouse inside the building complete with a front porch and gutters. The farmhouse has a thick mat of AstroTurf for a front yard. “We knew we were at that age where we would be spending more time at work than we would at home. We were fine with that, but we wanted it to feel like home since we would be here so much. We wanted to showcase the walls and the original tin ceiling but still make it a functional space for us.”
