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Bingo
Bingo is held every Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the Gaston County Senior Center.
Old friends are invited to play bingo, canasta, Scrabble, Boggle, poker, Jenga, checkers, ping-pong and more. Or bring your favorite game and teach the group. No partners are required, and admission is free. Prizes are also awarded.
The Gaston County Senior Center is located at 1303 Dallas-Cherryville Highway.
Call (704)922-2170.
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Restoring a work of art
By THOMAS LARK
- Thu, Aug 28, 2008
BELMONT—History says that Pope Julius II repeatedly asked Michelangelo when the Sistine Chapel would be completed.
“When will you make an end?” the pontiff demanded.
“When it is finished!” the great artist famously replied.
To finish the frescoes would take Michelangelo four years.
But at Belmont City Hall, it would seem that a mere five or so working days would do the trick. Last week, artist Peter DeAnna’s 68-year-old mural, “Maj. William Chronicle’s South Fork Boys,” received a meticulous restoration, thanks to Crawford Conservation, Inc.
Craig Crawford of Columbia, S.C., was on hand and atop a scaffold, along with assistant Jaime Morgan, busily sponging away nearly seven decades of dust and damage to the oil painting. Morgan is an art major at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.
Crawford said the pair employed ammonium citrate, cotton swabs and water to help reverse the ravages of time.
What does he like most of all about restoring works of art?
“Bringing it back so that it can be enjoyed and be as close as possible to how it was intended to be seen,” he said. “And I enjoy the process. It’s important to preserve these works for the future.”
The restoration was promoted by the Belmont Historical Society and funded by the city of Belmont, according to BHS President Bob Brown.
“We think this is a priceless painting,” Brown said, watching Crawford and Morgan as they brushed away delicately on the wall. “It pertains to our American independence. We don’t want this painting lost. We’re eager to preserve it. It ties this community to our success in the American Revolution. William Chronicle was a major player in the Battle of Kings Mountain.”
Oct. 7, 1780, Chronicle would ride off to his death—and the pages of history—when he and his militia took on the British and Loyalist forces of Maj. Patrick Ferguson, the inventor of the Ferguson rifle and a key figure in the army of Lord Charles Cornwallis.
DeAnna’s painting depicts Chronicle—whose home once stood near the modern offices of the BHS on Catawba Street—mustering his men to go off and fight at Kings Mountain. In those days, Brown pointed out, the village that would one day be known as Belmont was part of Lincoln County. And indeed, according to friend and fellow BHS member Eloise Buthe, much of the land comprising Belmont today was once Chronicle’s plantation.
Brown said that in 1940, Belmont City Hall was actually the local post office—a fact born out by the building’s distinctive façade. Buthe said that DeAnna’s mural was among the many works of art commissioned for post offices in those days at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt.
“It and other art was produced under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts,” Buthe explained. “In the words of President Roosevelt, it would be art that was ‘native, human, eager and alive…that was painted for the people of this country by their own kind, in their own country and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.’”
She said about 1,200 murals and 300 sculptures for U.S. Post Office facilities were commissioned to artists who competed anonymously at both national and regional levels. Another such painting is in the Lincolnton Post Office.
Also present during the mural’s restoration was Rob Lewis, a local historical reenactor who is known for portraying Chronicle. After watching Crawford and Morgan for a time, Lewis, decked out in full Revolutionary War garb, said he had to return to work at Keith Hawthorne Ford, where he is a parts runner.
“You’ve got to work so you can do reenactments!” he observed, grinning as he doffed his tricorn and headed for the door.
And an important reenactment is coming soon. Brown said Lewis and others will replay the Battle of Kings Mountain in Stowe Park, Oct. 25-26, at 9 a.m. both days. That Sunday’s events will start off with an 18th century-style preaching service.
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