Drivers heading north on Route 100 byway will be greeted by a colorful new sign at Lost Nation Brewing welcoming them to Morrisville.
What may not be immediately obvious is that the detailed mural was designed by a Peoples Academy junior and completed with the effort of over 80 volunteers.
Allen Van Anda, the restaurant and brewery’s owner, approached Averill McDowell’s art class at the high school with a simple prompt, to design something that captured the spirit of Morrisville in the style of the “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” postcard made famous by the Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 debut album.
Though not particularly familiar with The Boss, Peoples Academy junior Rory Monaghan successfully pitched a fleshed-out design to McDowell and became the project’s head designer. Like the source material, each letter in “Morrisville” contains an image, which in this iteration reflects a regional theme.
“I kind of went for more of a Vermont theme than just Morrisville, because we don’t ski in Morrisville directly, and the covered bridges are just like a Vermont thing,” Monaghan said. “We definitely wanted to do live music and food to go with things that happen here at Lost Nation, and then there’s just more Vermont things like the leaves and like the maple syrup and the Lamoille River.”
A lot of the materials were donated by Country Home Center in Morrisville, and a team of student-led volunteers worked to have the mural done for the ribbon-cutting last Friday.
“The whole concept of the mural was community, so starting at the school was sort of the base of that community, and the foundation to that community,” Van Anda said. “They could have done anything, we probably would have been happy with it, but the school has done all these beautiful murals already.”
Monaghan may still be contemplating whether to pursue a career in the arts, but she’s already an old pro at designing and painting murals. Her design for a sunflower mural was chosen for the high school cafeteria by her peers, and she recently completed a mural for the daughter of a Peoples Academy middle school teacher with her sister, Sadie, who also helped with the Lost Nation mural.
Monaghan hopes to continue working on murals, especially those that beautify the community.
“It’s really cool because they’re done pretty fast, especially when we have so many people working on them,” Monaghan said. “It’s really cool to just be able to have a finished product that you can just look at and say ‘Wow, look how far we came.’”