Athens High School art students will commemorate the city's 200th anniversary by painting a mural that will look like this rendering. AHS students and teachers will paint the mural on the building where Wildwood Deli is located in Athens.

On a wall facing Washington Street in the heart of Athens, art students and teachers from Athens High School plan to paint a 30-foot-high mural depicting sites and scenes from the city throughout its 200-year history

Paid for by a bicentennial grant from the state, the mural will feature rows and rows of budding cotton fields, an old steam engine hearkening back to the days of the Tennessee & Central Alabama Railway and just about every historic building in Limestone County. The painting will go up on the side of the building where Wildwood Deli is located on Market Street.

Doug Gates, the owner of the building, recently painted the wall, giving students a “fresh canvas” on which to create their masterpiece.

The idea for the mural started with Beverly Bobo, an art teacher at AHS, who was looking for a way to secure a bicentennial grant for the community. The one-time grants are available to support community and county activities, events and projects commemorating the state’s 200th anniversary. Funding is available for one grant per county or community.

“I put out feelers to see what sort of ideas we could come up with,” Bobo said. She eventually got in contact with Holly Hollman, grant coordinator and communication specialist for the city, who suggested a mural.

“Athens has such a rich history,” Bobo said. “We thought wouldn’t it be great to capture much of it in one place?”

Working with her students, Bobo and Leah Pierce, an art teacher at SPARK Academy at Cowart and HEART Academy at Julian Newman Elementary took their submissions, combining them into a rendering of the complete mural.

“That was the only way we could use a little bit of everyone’s ideas and still have a polished painting,” Pierce said. “But the whole thing is based on the students.”

In addition to Athens’ many historical buildings, the mural includes structures such as Trinity, the Big Spring Park Duck Pond — because that water source is what initially drew people to the area — and events such as the Storytelling Festival, Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention and Athens Grease Festival. In the background, the word Athens stands in the style of a large letter postcard. Within each letter are intricate scenes of daily life in Athens.

Hollman approved the rendering of the mural Tuesday.

“Trying to encompass 200 years of history into one mural is a daunting task,” Hollman said. “But these teachers and students researched Athens and found a way to highlight some of our sites, events and culture.”

The students who created it decided to incorporate a scavenger hunt for the Athens Bicentennial Bash on Nov. 17 that would inspire community members to dig even deeper into the city’s history. The hunt will start at the mural, where participants will chose a historical site or icon to find in the city. Once they find it, they will get further clues, sometimes in the form of a recorded oral history, to complete the scavenger hunt. AHS students will soon start working on compiling these histories from community members.

First- through third-place prizes will be awarded to those who complete the hunt the fastest the day of the Bicentennial Bash.

“The mural shows them history, the oral histories allow them (participants in the scavenger hunt) to get to know the people who make up our history,” Bobo said. “It’s important we create an archive of these people’s stories because we don’t know how long they will be with us, and they have some great stories to share.”

Work on the wall is set to begin Aug. 16, so long as they can secure the necessary scaffolding by that time. Painting on the lower portions of the wall will be done by students. For safety reasons, painting on the upper portions will be completed by AHS teachers.

Bobo is confident the $2,000 Bicentennial grant will be more than enough to cover the cost of painting the mural. If all goes as planned, she expects it to be finished by the first week in October, in plenty of time for the bicentennial celebration.