This article is part of a series created in collaboration with UPLIFT North Carolina, a program that supports rural tourism throughout the state. Since July 2023, our partnership has provided participatory workshops and mentorship, working with partners to support and develop festivals and cultural heritage tourism experiences that benefit both visitors and communities.
In early 2025, when Stuart Watlington visited the grave of his parents in Yanceyville, North Carolina, he was met with a surprise. From where he stood at the Yanceyville Presbyterian Church Cemetery, he could see a sixteen-foot-tall image of his father, Neal Watlington, a Major League Baseball catcher and World War II hero, on a new mural in the town square.
“I believed Stuart, but I had to see it for myself,” says Karen Williamson, executive director of Caswell Arts, a nonprofit organization that promotes the arts as a means of enriching lives and building community in Caswell County. Williamson was the force behind the mural, “Before Us.” Painted by artist Jason Turner, it depicts four important figures in local history.
Not only could see the mural be seen from the cemetery, Williamson said, “but his father was also the only one of the four you could see from that spot.”
For Stuart Watlington, it was “as if the image was put there to watch over both my parents, who were married for sixty-seven years.”
For Williamson, it was just another serendipity imbued throughout a hard-won project. “As much strife as we went through to get this project completed, the community stood behind it,” she said. “And it is a triumph for Caswell County.”
Defining a New Identity in Caswell County
Caswell County is located in North Carolina’s Piedmont and borders Danville, Virginia. With a total population of just over 20,000, farming is central to the area’s identity. Starting in the nineteenth century, bright leaf tobacco, farmed using the labor of enslaved Black people, was a dominant crop. Though people lived and farmed in the area well before the county’s formal establishment, the county seat of Yanceyville wasn’t incorporated until 1986, making it a young town—but one with an older and declining population.
“Once [young people] graduate from school, there’s not a whole lot of jobs to keep them here,” Williamson said.
Even before her time as executive director of Caswell Arts, Williamson was interested in finding ways to invigorate cultural tourism and strengthen local pride. She imagined finding funding for a postcard-style “Welcome to Yanceyville” mural, or the ubiquitous murals of wings popping up around the country for selfie opportunities. “Something family-friendly and non-controversial,” she laughed.
As the idea developed, Caswell Arts decided to push for something unique to the area. Over the years, Williamson collaborated with griot and storyteller Fred Motley of Danville to develop public history initiatives. One media project focused on a set of local people in the county’s history: furniture maker Thomas Day, painter Maud Gatewood, trailblazing midwife Henrietta Jeffries (Williamson’s great-great-grandmother), and educator N.L. Dillard.
Day’s life as a free Black craftsman was already well-documented, and his home in nearby Milton was in the process of becoming North Carolina’s twenty-seventh historic site. So Caswell Arts added someone lesser-known for their vision of a mural highlighting four significant local figures: Neal Watlington.
“There’s a lot of history in Caswell County,” Williamson said. “But we specifically wanted to highlight and celebrate people whose lives were committed to the betterment of the community.”
Four Individuals, One Artwork
Maud Gatewood (1934–2004) is one of North Carolina’s best-known artists. As an educator, she coordinated the art program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte during the late 1960s. She also did commercial work locally. “[Gatewood] was actually a family friend of my grandfather, and she designed the logo for his business,” Turner, the mural painter, said. Gatewood was a fierce arts advocate and instrumental in saving the Thomas Day House and Union Tavern in 1989 after it was damaged in a fire.
Nicholas Longworth Dillard (1906–1969) was a teacher, principal, and education advocate for the county’s Black students. Among his many accomplishments, he established the county’s first high school for Black students, led the full accreditation of Caswell County Training School, and played a pivotal role in planning the integration of the county’s public schools.
Julius “Neal” Watlington (1922–2019) was a Yanceyville-born athlete who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, where he earned both a Purple Heart and the French Legion of Honor Award. Upon returning from war, he restarted his baseball career and eventually became a catcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. For more than fifty years, he and his wife, Katherine, owned a successful department store, Watlington’s on the Square. They were important members of the Yanceyville community.
Henrietta Phelps Jeffries (1857–1926) was a Black midwife, beloved for her service to all who lived in Milton and surrounding areas. She was the defendant in State v. Henrietta Jeffries, an infamous 1913 Yanceyville trial where she was accused of practicing medicine without a license. As the “Before Us” mural biography notes, “In an unprecedented move, the judge stepped down from the bench, stood beside Henrietta, defended her cause, and overrode the jury’s decision, dismissing the charges.”
Another descendant of Jeffries, historian Vanessa “Twinkle” Richmond-Graves, learned her great-grandmother’s story through family storytelling, but she says Jeffries’ legacy is well-known in the area and beyond.
“She was also a founder of Milton’s Macedonia A.M.E. church,” Richmond-Graves said. “And for a woman to be a founder of a church then is very notable.”
“These four individuals’ stories can be told using the backdrop of the town square, which is right around the corner from where the mural is located,” Williamson said. “And we felt it was fair and balanced—two Black people, two white people, two men, two women. She added with a laugh, “Even two people with glasses and two without!”
Designing “Before Us”
Caswell Arts was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant for the mural in January 2024 and had until the end of the year to complete the project. In another stroke of serendipity, they contracted a muralist who had strong ties to the local community. Turner was a New York-based artist who had moved to Caswell County for a change of pace during the pandemic. His stepfather was a local, and Turner had grown up visiting the area regularly.
“I remember so many things about the square and the street the mural ended up being on,” he said. Turner was an advocate for art and artists and had joined Caswell Arts looking for ways to contribute.
“I think public art, generally speaking, is just a terrific way to unite groups of people,” he said.
Turner started his research for “Before Us” in the Gunn Memorial Library’s Caswell County history room and connected with descendants of each person who would be depicted. “I was able to kind of understand who they were as people and their roles in the community, just from talking to people who had known them,” he said.
For each subject, Turner also had photo references. His aesthetic is rooted in American etching and woodcuts, characterized by a textured portrait on a flat background, accentuated by a minimalist color scheme.
“By simplifying an image, you can distill meaning and also give a lot of space for the viewer to put their own perception into the art,” he said. He chose a yellow background as a nod to the vibrant bright leaf tobacco so important to the region’s history. And he added purple, he said, as a reference to royalty and the respect the community feels toward the four mural subjects.
A Controversial Figure
Problems cropped up as the project developed. Plans for the mural to be painted in the town square fell through, despite what Williamson described as strong community support.
“What became very clear was that there was a controversy,” she said. “Some people objected to the fact that Maud Gatewood was a part of this mural.”
Caswell Arts selected a second location, a wall on the side of what was once Yanceyville’s drugstore but is now a county building. Williamson appeared before the Caswell County Board of Commissioners the day after Labor Day to brief the group on the intention behind the project and its potential benefits to economic development—and to get permission to paint the mural. After receiving minimal feedback and no decision, she was brought back in late September.
“This is where the board’s issue came to light,” Williamson said. From 1976 to 1980, Gatewood had been a county commissioner and the board’s first female member. There was debate about whether she had spoken disparagingly about the board during her time. “Maud did not suffer fools,” Williamson laughed. “She spoke her mind, and from what I have been told, she at times spoke like a sailor. But she was for the greater good.”
To disprove the allegation, a local historian and the county clerk reviewed every meeting transcript from Gatewood’s board tenure. After more deliberations with the board, the “Before Us” mural was approved— in the same exact room where Williamson’s great-great-grandmother’s midwifery trial had taken place—with the stipulation that the Town of Yanceyville also needed to pass a vote.
By the time Caswell Arts received a vote of unanimous approval from the town, they had to request an extension from the NEA. And by then, Turner’s original cost quotes for paint and other materials were no longer accurate. Inflated prices caused another delay. But finally, Turner could start work.
Installing “Before Us”
Turner’s process on site began with filling cracks in the wall, power washing the surface, creating image transfers, and prepping for painting.
Looking back, he laughed that winter is not the ideal time to be outdoors working on an art project. “And brick walls are incredibly tricky creatures,” he said. Despite these challenges, Turner and the Caswell Arts team were energized by the community’s response to the work in progress. Passersby would park their cars or stop to sit and watch the process.
“I got so many stories while I was painting,” Turner recalled. “I learned more and more about these people as I was putting them onto the wall, and I was kind of putting more of their personalities into it.”
It felt as though any remaining bit of skepticism was turning into support. Turner remembered a man looking dubiously at Dillard’s image in progress and then returning days later to see the finished image and saying, “You got him. That’s what he looked like.” It turned out the man had been a mentee of Dillard’s. “He taught me everything,” he told Turner.
“More than anything, I felt like the Black community of Caswell County was really rallying behind me,” Turner said. “And I had multiple people say that, finally, they felt represented. Finally, they had something of theirs in the town.”
New Artwork and New Opportunities
Turner finished the mural on March 10, 2025, and Caswell Arts had a dedication ceremony on March 23. It was attended by more than 200 people, with multiple community members sharing personal stories of the four community leaders depicted. Williamson said the dedication showed the success of the project, but it was a bittersweet moment.
“The following week, on Wednesday, March 26, we turned in our final report—and that was the same day that the federal government shut down the Challenge America program,” she explained.
Caswell Arts is now working to develop guided tours, educational activities, and family reunion activities centered around “Before Us.” A QR code next to the mural links explanatory materials for self-guided tours.
“We want to appeal to our own community and the subjects’ descendants, but we’re thinking of others, too,” Williamson said. “We want all kinds of people—war history buffs, baseball fans, midwives and women’s health advocates, artists and art historians, people interested in Rosenwald schools and Black education—to come and learn these stories.”
Williamson hopes that by seeing this mural through, the public at large will be supportive of more public art projects. “Learning and helping others to learn about the richness of the history that’s local here—I hope that will encourage good, positive change,” she said.
Richmond-Graves, the historian, agrees. “So much of history in America now is not currently being uplifted,” she said. “But this is an example of how to talk about and make these stories known.”
Josephine McRobbie is an oral historian, researcher, and musician based in Durham, North Carolina.
This article received editorial support from the North Carolina Folklife Institute.
