New Mural Restores Old School’s Place In Bristol

If you were driving along Otter Street in Bristol Borough, it wouldn’t be surprising that one would pass the plain-looking building in the 100 block of Otter Street without looking twice.

But starting this week, the building that presently is a warehouse for Harris Comfort is going to be a bit harder to miss.

Civic group Bristol Borough: Raising the Bar unveiled a new mural outside the building Wednesday morning.

With a healthy-sized crowd gathered outside the building that features the three-story circa-1851 schoolhouse nestle into it, Raising the Bar President Bill Pezza showed off the borough’s newest piece of public art.

Harold Mitchener, a historian from the Bristol Cultural and Historical Foundation, grew up right around the corner from the building. He highlighted the history of the school that often is passed by.

The gothic-style structure replaced a school on Wood Street in the 1850s. The new building served as a school for borough kids through the 1880s and was sold to the Mohican tribe when a new school on Bath Street opened. The former school was then named Mohican Hall. It held gatherings and was even used as a late 1880s roller-skating hall during a spike in the activity’s popularity.

According to Doron Green’s book The History of Bristol Borough, the site where the school was built may have been a cemetery during the Revolutionary War for soldiers from General John Cadwalader’s army that was encamped in town.

Artist Jean-Marc Dubus created the school-centric mural that features a view of the building in the past and also what a classroom would have looked like in the mid-1800s.

“It reveals a part of Bristol history that was hidden for many years,” he said.

Dubus explained that he painted the mural pieces at his studio and then transported the canvas down to Otter Street to apply the panels over the weekend. The total time to create the mural took about 200 hours of work and another 16 hours to install it.

Mayor Joe Saxton celebrated the new mural and its focus on history.

The mayor grew up near the old schoolhouse. His parents told him not to go inside the building when he growing up because the building was haunted, but he thinks they didn’t want their son getting into mischief, he said with a chuckle.

Building owner Harris Comfort and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development funded creation of the mural. The Redevelopment Authority of Bucks County administered the state façade grant that helped pay for the mural.

“This works because of partnerships,” Pezza told the crowd.

“The project presents the perfect opportunity to advance three of our goals: promoting the arts, telling a story of Bristol’s rich and diverse history, and preserving or restoring aspects of our oldest commercial buildings,” said Pezza.

“While it was not structurally or financially feasible to return the entire building to its original design, we were excited by the potential to tell the story of the building’s original use and demonstrate that art and history can live in harmony with the commercial/industrial nature of that part of the Otter Street block,” he added.

Students from Snyder-Girotti Elementary School took part in the event and performed a sketch where students from today talked to their peers from the mid-1800s when the school was open.

More murals could be on the horizon for the borough, but, as Pezza noted, future murals are dependent on community support and funding.

There are other murals located at at Penn Community Bank at the Mill Street Parking Lot, mural on Old Route 13, one on Market Street, and the most recent at the William Penn Bank branch on Otter Street.

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