page_title: Cleveland Trust Company Building
section_title: Murals
hierarchical_section_title: Cleveland Trust Company Building / About the original building / Murals
caption_attribution_description: English: Main banking room in the Cleveland Trust Company Building in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States in 1909.
context_page_description: The Cleveland Trust Company Building is a 1907 building designed by George B. Post and located at the intersection of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland's Nine-Twelve District. The building is a mix of Beaux-Arts, Neoclassical, and Renaissance Revival architectural styles. It features a glass-enclosed rotunda, a tympanum sculpture, and interior murals.
  In 1910, the Chicago school-style, 13-story Swetland Building was built adjacent to the east of the Cleveland Trust Company Building. In 1971, the Brutalist-style, 29-story Cleveland Trust Tower was built adjacent to the south of the Cleveland Trust Company Building. The Cleveland Trust Company Building underwent a significant interior renovation from 1972 to 1973, but closed to the public in 1996. Cuyahoga County purchased all three structures as part of the "Ameritrust complex" in 2005. In 2013, the Cleveland Trust Company Building was sold to the Geis Cos., which renovated it into a grocery store. The basement area of the former bank became a bar and nightclub. Much, although not all, of the Cleveland Trust Company Building's original interior architectural and interior design elements have been retained.
context_section_description: The drum of the building was supported by arches supported by the interior columns. The tympanum framed by these arches were decorated by murals designed and painted by Francis David Millet.
  The Cleveland Trust Company hired Millet some time in the fall of 1908. Millet sketched out various designs for the murals until he developed a design he liked. Then a full-size "cartoon" (black and white line drawing) of the sketch was put in place in the tympanum to ensure that the design worked visually. After adjusting the design as needed, Millet sketched and then painted 13 smaller versions of the murals, each of them about 18 inches (46 cm) in height and 3 to 4 feet (0.91 to 1.22 m) in width. Work on the draft paintings at Millet's Forest Hill studio in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was under way by at least late March 1909. The completed draft murals were displayed at the Washington Architectural Club exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in early May 1909.
  These small paintings were scaled up and transferred to manila paper using charcoal sticks. These scaled-up versions were corrected (if needed), and restudied in place in the tympanum. By late May, Millet was still at work adjusting the murals and finishing the final drafts. Work on the murals was complete by June 5, 1909. Millet put the completed murals on display at his Forest Hill studio for a week beginning on June 10, 1909. During this time, they were viewed by President William Howard Taft, various officials of the federal government, and members of the diplomatic corps. The final works were again transferred to manila paper using charcoal sticks, and the manila drawings used to transfer the design to canvas which was then affixed to the wall. Millet and three assistants spent a year transferring Millet's designs to the walls, work which was completed in late December 1909 or early January 1910.
  Titled The Development of Civilization in America, the paintings include: "The Norse Discoverers", "The Puritans", "Exploration By Land", "LaSalle on Lake Erie", "Father Hennepin at Niagara Falls", "Exploration By Water", "Migration", "Buying Land From the Indians", "Surveying the Site of Cleveland", "Felling the Timber", "Building the Log Cabin", "Plowing the Clearing", and "Gathering the Harvest". Each mural was 15.5 by 4.5 feet (4.7 by 1.4 m) in size. To ensure that the paintings could be seen from the ground floor 40 feet (12 m) below, Millet designed them to be simple, with broad fields of deep blue, deep green, and bright red. Each mural used the same color scheme, and the horizon line in each mural aligns with the horizon line in the adjacent murals.
caption: 1909 photograph of the interior of the Cleveland Trust Company Building.
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