Paint progress
Mural on Cass Avenue abutment celebrates city’s role in railroad development.
WOONSOCKET — It has taken a lot of work by a local teacher and her students but the mural dedicated to the city’s role in the development of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railroad spur to New England is starting to stand out on an abandoned railroad abutment on Cass Avenue.
High School Art teacher Diane Mayers and members of her gifted art class took on the task of making a former graffiti-marked wall on Cass a place for art about a year ago and have laid out what is now a artistic rendering of the man who built the abutment and the story as to why the railroad line it was to serve never came to be.
Working at the mural this week with her husband Kit while getting ready for another round of painting by her students when school resumes at the end of the month, Mayers said she hopes to get the mural all done by October because that is when she will be retiring from the high school after 30 years of teaching.
“I think it should come out really nice but it has just taken a while because we had to contend with a lot of bad weather, rain and hot temperatures over the summer,” she explained.
The paint used for the project can be difficult to apply in the heat because it dries so quickly and of course there is no painting when it rains, she noted.
The mural was designed by Mayers students to tell the story of Canadian railroad tycoon, Charles M. Hays, and his bid to built a railroad line connecting Providence and its shipping harbor to his Canadian Grand Trunk line through a stretch of the Central Vermont Railroad beginning in Palmer, Mass., that his company also owned.
The Rhode Island section of Hays’ planned Southern New England Railway was to have started in Providence, passed through a section of elevated and level grade rail line running through Woonsocket into nearby Blackstone and Millville before crossing central Massachusetts to Palmer.
Hays, who had also been behind the construction of his company’s Pacific Grand Trunk Railway running across Canada from Montreal and Quebec, built much of the ground layout for the new airline route, the abutments and rail beds, before heading off to Europe to secure the steel needed for rails. The company operating in Canada was headquartered in England, and Hays booked passage back to the United States on a new ship of the White Star Line, the HMS Titanic. As history records too well, the Titanic never completed its maiden voyage to the United States and Hays was among the passengers ending their voyage home in the cold Atlantic.
While work on the local line stopped in Rhode Island after Hays’ death, work continued in Massachusetts for a time and there were even attempts to restart the project through the 1930s as a way to end the New Haven Railroad Co.’s tight-fisted control of rail transport in Southern New England.
The Southern New England Railroad with its soaring concrete bridge and viaducts over its competitors’ lines was never finished in the end and today just abutments like the one on Cass Avenue and another on George Street in the city hint at what might have been if Hays had opted to take a less luxurious ship home.
Mayers said her students put together a graphic layout for the abutment mural that has a portrait of Hays at the left side and a rendering of the Titanic above him. A ice berg will be at the top of a set of railroad rails in the center, and a railroad steam engine and the people to be found a train station like the one at Depot Square takes up the right side of the mural.
About 19 of Mayers students have worked on the project and they have painted the people now seen standing on the docks or the railyard looking up at the Titanic and the train.
After the mural is completed, Mayers said she would love to see all the students who worked on it stop by on April 14, the next anniversary of the Titanic’s fateful 1912 encounter with the ice berg, and to remember all those who perished and how those losses affected even Woonsocket, a mill town on the Blackstone with high hopes for the future.
Mayers said she asked her class to begin thinking about a painting for the abutment site after former City Councilman Garett Mancieri asked her if there was something she could do about making the old concrete wall more attractive to those driving by on Cass Avenue.
She remembered at that point that her mother, Muriel Galley, now 82, had told her about the history of the Grand Trunk and its ties to the abutment on Cass Avenue.
Her husband, Kit, a teacher’s assistant at the Globe Park Elementary School, said his mother-in-law didn’t have all the details but she did know story of how it came to be abandoned.
Mayers students set about researching all aspects of the abutment’s connection to the Grand Trunk Railroad and Charles Hays, and mural is the result of their work, their teacher said.
“It is based on photographs and all the other information they found,” she said.
The next step in the project was preparing the old concrete wall to take paint and hold it, and then another step to plan out how the image would be laid out on the wall with a grid approach.
After that the students and Mayers started painting the mural and their progress can be seen on Cass today.
The mural will likely be the last project she takes on at Woonsocket High given her retirement, and Mayers said that does come with a bit of bittersweet feelings. “My position has already been filled and I will only be back for a month before my retirement date, October 1, comes along,” she said. The mural will be there in the future, however, as a lasting tribute to the city’s rich history and those who choose to preserve it.