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The town of Valentine, Nebraska was founded in 1882. A Post Office was soon established, and the railroad reached the town the following year. Kady Faulkner's mural "The End of the Line" commemorates this event. Faulkner, who was an artist and art teacher beloved by students at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, visited Valentine to do research for her painting and included many local elements in her composition. The main composition shows freight being unloading from covering wagons of the Niobrara Transportation Company and prepared for loading onto the newly-arrived train. The Niobrara River flows placidly in the background. Below the main composition Faulkner painted a band with brands from local ranches above a pair of vignettes: the nearby sandhills on the left, and a farm with a barbed wire fence and windmills on the right. Faulkner was known as a painter of the American Scene, and this work might have been expected to fit in perfectly with local tastes and preferences. But, no, everyone in Valentine seemed to hate it. Faulkner was excoriated as an out-of-touch Easterner, despite her decade of teaching in Lincoln. The train, as people pointed out enthusiastically, was of a type that had been used earlier, in the 1850s, leading the local newspaper to conclude that artists seem to have no attachment to the truth.
It's hard to understand why Faulkner's painting produced such a negative reaction from the citizens of Valentine. She was experienced as a teacher who had previously visited small towns in Nebraska and charmed their inhabitants with her combination of a deep knowledge of art and a pleasing, informal style of presentation. But none of this seemed to help her in Valentine. She was used to adversity, having survived a scary bout of polio as a child. And she faced more adversity in the future, resigning her position in Lincoln in the wake of what amounted to an administrative coup. She settled later in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where her grandparents had founded the Simmons Mattress Company. In Kenosha she taught at Kemper Hall, an Episcopalian school for girls, for twenty years, matching the twenty years she had spent previously in Lincoln. In both positions she was revered as a teacher and admired for her continuing production of art.
Today Faulkner's mural can still be seen in the building where it was originally hung in 1939. But that building is no longer a post office. When a new post office was constructed, the old building became the Education Service Unit Media Center the Cherry County Schools, helping to support literacy programs in the County's many one-room schoolhouses. Today it continues to serve as a storeroom and distribution hub for School District. Because the Postal Service had abandoned this facility, Faulkner's painting did not undergo restoration when the Postal Service undertook a restoration program for all Nebraska Post Office murals in 1981. But the mural is still in place, largely forgotten, never mentioned by the local tourist bureau, and hence seldom seen by anyone.