Question: Baldwinsville is very fortunate to have so many stately homes built by many of our early citizens. This magnificent manor has seen a lot of changes over the years. It sets on a very busy street corner. Do you know where it is located and by what names that area has been called? What did the original owner do for a living?
Last week’s answer: Last week’s photo was taken in 2007 and features the mural on the Oswego Street side of the building at 1 W. Genesee St. This was the third in a succession of murals that graced the wall. It has since been replaced by mural number four.
Situated at the busiest intersection in the village, the wall has been a prime location for both advertising and public art. Erected in the 1830s, the wall served as a billboard for many downtown merchants, usually those that resided within the building itself. After World War II the large brick wall was more often a canvas for public art.
The mural in the photograph was painted in 1987, the third in a series of murals of historic Baldwinsville. The first was rendered in the 1960s during the era of the Corner Cakery. The mural spanned the entire width of the wall and showed a view of the Seneca River dam with a mill and vertical water wheel.
Time and weather took a toll on the artwork. Inspired by the upcoming national bicentennial observation, a community effort was made to refresh the wall in 1974. The Chamber of Commerce sandblasted the brick. Members of Baker High School’s Alpha Mu sorority applied a base coat that was donated by Bilyeu’s Color Center. The Beauchamp Historical Club and the Baldwinsville Art Guild collaborated to research local history and to paint the wall. Chosen subjects included log cabins, a covered bridge, the wooden Grace Episcopal Church, the Soldiers’ Monument, a packet boat, two early village mills and our earliest inhabitants, Native Americans. That mural was painted by Jeane Custin, Barb Enders, Marie Towlson, Evelyn Donley and Jean Gilmer.
By 1987 the wall was showing the effects of weather and automotive emissions. Under the leadership of Eagle Scout candidate Willie Barnes, the wall was once again refurbished with a new design of historic Baldwinsville.
Barnes sent an email to the Messenger after seeing last week’s photo, which shows a section of this third mural. He recalled working with the local Art Guild as well as Mike Conway to redesign the mural and scrape the paint off the wall next to the Corner Cakery with some help from the fire department and Troop 71 and Scoutmaster Joel Van Keuren.
“Larry Tipper, Jay Crook and myself painted the white background/base coat; Mike Conway and the art guild then painted the mural that was in existence from July 1987 to two or three years ago,” Barnes wrote. “The skyline from the first, second and current iterations of the mural (I believe) remains intact — it was the Baldwinsville skyline from the turn of the 20th century.”
Others wrote in not to recall the mural itself, but rather the business whose side it adorned: The Corner Cakery.
“That bakery smelled fantastic as soon as you walked through the door,” Patricia Sieber wrote on the Messenger’s Facebook page. “You can almost remember the screen door slamming shut behind you.”
“Best half-moons on the planet — only 5 cents,” recalled Jeff Stevens, also on Facebook. “Made my walk to school (uphill, both ways) a little easier.”
For Paul Johnson, it was another treat that made those long walks to school a little more bearable.
“Every morning got day old glazed donuts for a dime while walking to school,” he wrote on Facebook.
But the Corner Cakery is gone, and so is the Barnes mural. Its replacement, a vibrant colorful assortment of historic Baldwinsville vignettes, was dedicated in 2013. The project of Girl Scout Gold Award candidate Emily Ekross, the current mural took two years from conception to completion due to environmental issues arising from the lead paint residue from earlier work. To learn more about the current mural visit
facebook.com/4CornersMuralProject.
Contact Editor Sarah Hall at [email protected] or leave a message at 434-8889 ext. 310 with your guess by 5 p.m. Friday (please leave the information in the message; we are not generally able to return calls regarding History Mystery responses). If you are the first person to correctly identify an element in the photo, your name and guess will appear in next week’s Messenger, along with another History Mystery feature. History Mystery is a joint project of the Museum at the Shacksboro Schoolhouse and the Baldwinsville Public Library.
