Historic Coca-Cola murals return to Hendersonville









Jack Fralin came to Hendersonville in a white pickup truck and paint-splattered denim shorts. His truck bed carried ladders on Monday, and paint cans, brushes and extra primer in the days that followed.

As Fralin looked at the north and south walls of 620 N. Main St. in Hendersonville for the first time Monday afternoon, the muralist from Roanoke, Virginia, arched his back and admired the brick-made canvas before him.

He could not see it anymore — not even a faint outline remained — but he knew what was hidden beneath layers of paint and time on these walls.

Here at the entrance into downtown Hendersonville were once two painted Coca-Cola murals, long since forgotten.

It was Fralin's job this week to bring them back.

"We're looking forward to making this something to see," Fralin said, as his crew scraped away flecks of sun-faded paint in 90-degree heat Monday. "Not a lot of people paint signs like this anymore. The modern world doesn't ask for it like it used to."

Hendersonville small business owner Mark Ray does not subscribe to modern conventions, though.

"I'm just all about the past," Ray said, as he sat inside his store surrounded by rare toy cars, airplanes, trains and other small collectible symbols of bygone eras.

During the late 19th and 20th centuries, property owners around the country would rent wall space to advertisers like Coca-Cola.

According to Phillip Mooney, who served as director of the Coca-Cola archives for more than 35 years, the practice was so widespread that about 25 percent of the soda company's entire advertising budget was devoted to wall signs in 1910.

Today, wall signs are the exception rather than the norm. But they are making a comeback on some of America's Main Streets.

"It speaks to some of the urban renewal happening across the country. People want to see what America was like then and they don't want to let it go, so we have enthusiasts that seek these things out," Fralin said, nodding toward Ray.

A 2-year journey

Two years ago, the owner of Dad's Collectibles in downtown Hendersonville noticed a photo at City Hall that showed an old Coca-Cola mural on the walls of the building at 620 N. Main St.

That photo was the beginning of Ray's two-year quest to bring a piece of Hendersonville's past into the present.

To do this, he combed through the Baker-Barber historic photo collection, a photographic record of Henderson County which dates back to 1884.

He asked members of the community to bring in their own photographs and share their memories about the Coca-Cola murals that once existed.

"One woman even brought in an old yearbook," he said, pointing to the photocopy he made of one of its pages. In the foreground, three eighth-grade homecoming candidates laugh as they sit in the back of a classic car during a parade through downtown Hendersonville. Behind them, an old Coca-Cola logo can be seen on the brick walls at 620 N. Main St.

Patting an envelope full of photos on his front desk, Ray pulled out photograph after photograph that showed the evolution of the Coca-Cola murals at 620 N. Main St. — from a late 1930s design of Coca-Cola's silhouette girl, to the words "Drink Coca-Cola" in white lettering on a red background.

He sent those images to Coca-Cola and made his case for why the murals should be brought back to their former glory.

"It's just a wonderful opportunity to give our little downtown Main Street a little bit more of a unique character than it already has," said Ray, who moved his business into 620 N. Main St. 60 days ago after being at 221 N. Main St. for 17 years. "To me, history is so core to who we are as a community."

This isn't the first time Ray's passion for the past guided him.

In 2013, the downtown shop owner led the charge to restore the O.B. McClintock clock. On the corner of Fourth Avenue and Main Street, the green timepiece had fallen into disrepair. Today, it continues telling time.

"When he gets involved, he jumps in with both feet," said LuAnn Welter, administrative assistant at the Hendersonville planning department.

That dedication helped Ray seek out more photographic proof and be persistent in asking Coca-Cola to bring the murals back to Hendersonville.

This year, the soda company said yes.

"We get quite a few requests. I have about 35 on my short list currently — these will have to be completed over several years," said Emilie Nicholls, communications specialist at Coca-Cola Company Consolidated in Charlotte, which is the largest independent Coca-Cola bottler in the country.

Already eight mural restoration projects, like the one in Hendersonville, are planned this year in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Nicholls said, on average, the cost of doing one mural restoration is anywhere from $5,000-$10,000, depending on the condition and size of the mural, as well as the condition of the building itself.

Though wall signs no longer make up 25 percent of Coca-Cola's advertising budget, Nicholls said there is still value to be found in them.

"We feel that the preservation and restoration of these murals also preserves a piece of Americana culture," she said.

A lost practice, found again

As Fralin climbed the scaffolding to continue painting the 20-by-25-foot mural on the south side of the building, he moved his brush carefully around the loopy "L" in "Cola" and began adding burgundy paint to give more dimension to the white lettering.

Commissioned by the soft drink company to complete the Hendersonville murals, Fralin said he has gotten used to recreating classic Coca-Cola murals.

The font has become familiar.

He thinks the "silhouette girl" has her own bubbly personality.

Despite the familiarity, Fralin said the work remains a privilege and a somewhat rare trade in the age of digital billboards and pop-up advertisements.

"Getting to do something like this in our modern world is a nice thing," he said. "To actually be able to go out and practice this ancient craft when so many people are printing things and using computers, it's nice to be able to do something by hand."

The trade is something that Bill Johnson grew up with in Bedford, Virginia.

Johnson said he began sign painting when he was either 12 or 13. His father, Murrill Johnson, was the person who taught him how to trace the design to scale, paint with care and stay balanced when working at height.

"Every Saturday, he'd say 'Get in the truck, boy' and we'd go," he said with a chuckle.

Those Saturday trips turned into a lifelong occupation for Johnson, who has been painting signs for about 35 years. This week, he worked with Fralin on the 20-by-10-foot mural on the north side of Dad's Collectibles in Hendersonville.

After climbing down the ladder and looking up at his progress on the lettering for "Drink Coca-Cola" Wednesday, Johnson said there are fewer and fewer sign painters like himself and Fralin these days.

"It's a good trade — or it used to be," Johnson said. "I spent about 25 years painting billboards on the interstate until I got replaced by a computer."

Because the need for his specialized skills has declined, Johnson said there's something special about work he does — and he intentionally uses the word "work" not "art."

"To me, it's more like mechanical drawing," he said. "When I did the billboards, they would send me a sketch in the mail and I would just take a scale ruler up there with me, and draw it right on the board and paint it."

In his kit, Johnson has paint brushes that he estimates are about 150 years old. Some of the brushes have bristles made of squirrel hair — a feature he can't find anymore.

The murals in Hendersonville had their own unique feature, too. Not one trace of either wall sign existed anymore.

"Typically, Coca-Cola does ghost murals, so there's some silhouette that they're working from with existing dimension and color," Ray said. "This one has been painted over many, many times and has seen many iterations of Coca-Cola's marketing and advertising."

While Fralin and Johnson painted Coca-Cola's French lettering, Ray fielded phone calls about the murals-in-progress and proudly showed patrons his photo collection of murals past.

By Friday, he said, the murals were expected to be done.

But Ray could not just sit inside his shop. Almost every hour, Ray left his shop's air conditioning to see how things were going outside as the muralists added layers of oil paint to the wall.

"To me, it's so much more than an advertisement. It has a story about it," Ray said. "It's the kind of paint that sticks with you."