Rehabilitating a WWII Black Officers’ Club (U.S. National Park Service)

That is the commander’s house from World War II, and they built a chimney and a fireplace for the officer’s quarters. And this is the back, the rear of the Black Officers Club. And I just wanted to point off, so the large chimney here was added to the building by the German POWs. And then, this large stone embankment, is all German POW stonework. And so, there’s a whole series of World War II buildings at Leonard Wood that are associated with the German POW stonework that are eligible. And then there’s a river creek, historic district as well, where they modified with bridges, culverts, weirs, and stuff like that.

So, back to our club. So again, 43, the extension was added, the chimney was added, and the building mostly took shape as we see it today. One of the most interesting things, again, about this building, and in the last sentence there, is, there is a large mural over the fireplace and what we call the dance hall, the ballroom. And it’s a large mural, African American couple. And, not much was known in that 1988 survey or the 1993 survey about that mural at all until… Oh, I messed up. So, after World War II, training ended in 1946. Fort Leonard Wood was inactivated and was rented off to a rancher and cows were roaming over the entire cantonment, is reactivated in 1950 for Korea. My father was stationed there for Korea. And the club turned back into office space. And you can see here, from this photo, it’s used as a conference educational center. And you can see the fireplace there, in the far, with the mural above it.

And then, the floor plan was heavily modified and divided up into office space somewhere in the 1950s, 1960s. And at some point, that dance hall, that ballroom, was divided up into several spaces as well. When I first encountered it in 2002, it looked like this. The original wood siding had been covered over by steel painted siding. All of the windows had been replaced. The doors had all been replaced. The green asphalt roof shingles that should have been on here, were these dull, gray shingles. And it still sat lonely there, at the northern end of the cantonment. And here’s another view of it in 2003, with that German POW chimney on the rear extension that included the dance hall. And then we come to the story of the mural, and Stephanie will take care of this one.

Stephanie Nutt: So, our colleague and co-author, Steve Smith, was able to through a variety of research lanes, including his wife prodding him on certain places to go, to identify the artist. But it took quite awhile. He was brought in in 1998 to develop a historic context statement for the building, which included researching the mural. All that was visible at that time of the artist’s signature was his rank, which was staff sergeant, a couple of letters in his first name, and an N-T-E-E at the end of his last name.

He researched for about a year, wasn’t able to identify the artist, couldn’t find anything in the army art program records, and so eventually finalized his report. But he wasn’t, as a good historian, he wasn’t really ready to give up on it. And so he kept looking into things. His wife suggested looking into African American artists indices in the university library there. And so, he did that and he found a very brief entry to an artist named, Samuel Countee. So, the N-T-E-E at the end was a big red flag for him. He was able to find additional information about him and eventually… he found a mention of a work that he had painted in 1933, which is one of the boys sitting here, that you see, and it is entitled, Little Brown Boy. He was able to compare the signatures.

They looked very similar. And so, he felt like he had found the artist, did some more research, couldn’t really learn much more about him. His wife again intervened and said, “You saw some mention of him living in New York. Why don’t you check the New York Times obituaries?” Found an obituary for him also listing his wife’s name and their place of residence at the time of his death. On a whim, he looked in the New York phone books. This is 1998, so, he passed away in 1959. So, a lot of time has passed. He looked in New York phone books, found his wife, Mary Countee listed, picked up the phone and gave them a call. She had passed away. Her second husband, however, was still living. He had answered the phone and he said, “Oh yes, I knew Sam Countee. That was my wife’s first husband,” gave him some information and put him in touch with living family members. And so from there we learned lots and lots and lots about Samuel Countee’s life.

He was born in Marshall, Texas in 1909. He studied at Bishop College. His grandfather had actually founded Bishop College. He grew up in Houston, graduated from Bishop in 1934, was already displaying some of his works in local exhibitions and different places around the country. He went on to study at the Boston Museum school, and also at Harvard for several years. The other painting that you see here is a work of his from 1940 entitled, The Longshoreman. He eventually is drafted in 1942, and he enters into the military. He does his military training at Fort Leonard Wood. He was a dump truck driver with the 436th Engineer General Service Dump Truck Company. He was deployed to Iran, in support of the Persian Gulf command there. They were maintaining supply routes to the Soviet Union, overland supply routes. While there he was selected to paint and restore some murals in the Shah of Iran’s palace. And there is some documentation of that, that the family had.

He eventually comes back to Fort Leonard Wood after they’re sent back to the US, and in August of 1945, paints the mural in the Black Officers Club. The clipping there at the top, is a clipping from Our Post paper at the time, showing him standing next to it and mentioning that it had been recently finished. You can see the fireplace underneath there. And If you noticed, in the pictures Adam showed, that it was painted red. Originally it was not red. It was a natural stone. After his military service, he moved to New York. He continued his art career. But the war seems to have gotten him off track a little bit on his art career. He wasn’t really ever able to pick up speed and get back to where he was, but he did continue painting. He painted a lot of portraits and he also was a teacher at a public school and had several volunteer teaching positions as well. He marries, and is living in New Hempstead, New York. Oh God. Okay. Alright. Can I skip your character-define? Okay, we’re going to skip Adam’s other part.

Okay. Sorry. We’ll go back to that. So, Countee passed away in 1959, as I had mentioned. So, we have been in touch constantly. One of his nieces has visited Fort Leonard Wood, definitively identified the painting as his works, and she has been one of our constant consulting parties and friends throughout the process. Her name is Sammie Whiting Ellis. She was named after him. So, that brings us to the Section 106 Consultation Process. 2011, the building is vacated. It is eligible for the National Register. The environmental division moved out and there was no identified use for the building and no intended disposition.

For those of you that are familiar with Section 106 Process, that’s a big no, no. You have to have a plan for what you’re going to do with these buildings. Our internal command and senior leaders decided they were going to demolish it. That it would be demolished, the mural would be moved to the museum and the POW stonework would just be left in place at the site. There were others at Fort Leonard Wood and within the army that were very concerned about that course of action. But that’s what our senior leaders wanted to proceed with. So, we entered into consultation in 2012 with the advisory council in the Missouri SHPO, stating that the building was going to be demolished.

Several other consulting parties were added. And so, our core consulting parties where the National Trust, the Missouri Preservation, two local chapters of the NAACP, the Countee family members, in addition to the SHPO and the ACHP. It was a long, complex and contentious consultation process. We were in consultation from 2012 to 2015, on the ultimate disposition of this building. As you might imagine, our consulting parties urged the army to preserve the building. We had several changes of command and changes of attitude within our installation senior leaders, and that really turned things around for us. So, we went from a very unpleasant adverse effect to a no adverse effect to the historic property. We were able to develop a rehabilitation plan through a design charrette that our consulting parties participated very heavily in. So, this was the new floor plan. There were going to be classroom facilities on the north and south wings.