Jenne Magafan painted A Typical Western Town from 1939-1941 under the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a New Deal project that aimed to employ artists and craft an American arts culture. Magafan installed the painting in the Helper, Utah, Main Post Office, where visitors can still see it today.  

In 1941, New Deal-era artist Jenne Magafan of Colorado completed her mural, A Typical Western Town, in the Helper, Utah, Main Post Office. The post office building opened in 1938 and was placed by researchers on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. With its initial installment, A Typical Western Town was the first post office mural that Utah received with funding from the Section of Fine Arts.

Magafan won the chance to install the oil-on-canvas mural through the Forty-Eight State competition as a part of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. A well-known painter of the New Deal era who studied in a variety of institutions like the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Magafan practiced art with the mentorship of artists including Frank Mechau. The Section of Fine arts also commissioned Magafan for Post Office murals in Anson, Texas, and Glenwood Springs, Colorado. After completing the Helper mural, Magafan and her twin sister and fellow artist, Ethel, hung the painting over the postmaster’s office door.  

Magafan reflects the later nineteenth-century commotion of Helper’s industrial history in her mural riddled with motion. Helper, located in central Utah, was uniquely named after the additional locomotives that trains needed to ascend Soldier Summit, located between Helper and Salt Lake City, Utah. Helper once bustled as an activity center for many surrounding coal mining towns. Indeed, the history of coal mining in Carbon County is significant as it was crucial to the state’s economic development. Helper especially transformed into an economic hub after the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad’s completed its Castle Valley branch in 1883. Geologists discovered rich coal deposits in nearby Sunnyside along the path to Soldier Summit by Price Canyon, further cementing Carbon County as the coal mining center of Utah.

The five feet by twelve feet mural depicts a usual western town, likely during the bustling heights of Carbon County’s coal industry during the later nineteenth-century. In the central foreground, two men on horseback come to a stop as a curious dog barks at them. To the right, a “Blacksmith” sign stands above the shop’s worker, who appears to be repairing a wagon wheel. The left side includes a group of people conversing and a woman as she approaches a post office and grocery store. A saloon is placed next to the office. The background includes a wide blue sky. The focus is dedicated to the bustling and optimistic happenings of the town. Unlike other typical TSFA murals, A Typical Western Town does not feature specific natural landscapes. Rather, the lively, populated town that the work exhibits could reflect the thriving industrial history of Helper. 

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Helper—situated between Castle Gate and Price in Castle Valley—is the product of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad’s search for coal in the late nineteenth century. Low-grade coal fueled the railroads, but until the 1880s no one had discovered a coal seam of sufficient quality in Utah to produce good “coke” for industrial smelting. This meant that metal mines in other parts of the state could not process low-grade copper and silver at a profitable rate. The D&RGW extended through Castle Valley in the early 1880s in its search for coal, and an engineer for the railroad discovered high quality coal in Castle Gate. The town’s name comes from the railroads; “helper” locomotives waited along that stretch of railway to tow trains up the steep grade.

The demand for Castle Valley’s coal meant that there was an increased demand for workers. Italians, Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbians immigrated to the area to work in the mines, adding to the mix of cultures where Chinese people had previously worked on the railroad. In 1894, Carbon County split from Emery County. By then, it had an industry and ethnic mix distinct from the Mormon homesteaders to the south. By 1900 there were sixteen different nationalities represented in Helper in a population of only 385 people. This would increase in 1903 and 1904, as a strike at Castle Gate prompted the mine’s owners to bring in Greek and Japanese workers as strikebreakers.

With its location at the center of several nearby coal mining camps and farms, Helper became a hub for commerce for the many different ethnic groups in the county. Immigrants in Helper worked as merchants and business owners. European and Asian immigrants operated saloons and coffee houses and otherwise provided services for nearby workers. As a steadily growing town—in contrast to the boom towns usually associated with mining in the West—community life for its diverse enclaves became a part of Helper’s story. By the 1910s, there was a Catholic church in Helper and a Greek Orthodox church in nearby Price. There were Italian, Croatian, and Slovenian lodges in the county, and a YMCA in Helper served as a general public meeting place. The influx of immigrants during this pivotal time in Utah’s history has left a lasting imprint on the culture of Helper as well as the state overall.

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