Buck Winn's Mural

Sections of The History of Ranching, the 280-foot mural Buck Winn painted for the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio, hang in Johnson Hall at the Wimberley Community Center. Pearl commissioned it in 1950 for the Corral Room, an oval hospitality hall built inside the brewery's old horse barn. Six feet tall and running unbroken around the room's upper tier, it was believed at the time to be the longest mural in the world. Its scenes follow cattle ranching across the Southwest from the open range to fencing and the coming of the railroad. Winn, born in Celina in 1905, had lived on a ranch near Wimberley since 1940, and the painting spent twenty years lost before it came back to the town where he worked. In the early 1970s the brewery traded its Old West theme for a Gay Nineties look, and the Corral Room became the Lillie Langtry Room. The mural was cut down in pieces and headed for the dumpster. Chuck Remling, who had managed the room for fourteen years, saved the rolled-up pieces in a storage room on the brewery grounds, where they sat forgotten. In the early 1990s Dorey Schmidt, an art historian and founding member of the Wimberley Institute of Cultures, found sketches for the mural on the wall of Winn's studio and went looking for it. A brewery officer remembered Remling, Remling remembered the rolls, and by Schmidt's own account she and three volunteers collected the canvas the next day. A $5,000 gift from the John and Helen Sloan Art Foundation paid for most of the first section's restoration, and the sale of some panels later helped pay for more. Texas State University acquired three panels, about 82 feet of painting, and hung them in the Alkek Library in San Marcos in 2020.