Harford Mutual mural depicts 175-year story of company and its home county

March 23--When Harford Mutual Insurance Company President Steve Linkous brings first-time visitors into the company's board room, he takes them to the opposite side of the table that stretches across the room.

That's where they can get the best perspective and most comprehensive look at a 15-foot long mural drawn and painted by local artist Jim Butcher to commemorate the company's 175 years in Harford County, which it will celebrate next year.

"I always appreciate it from the opposite side of the table first," Linkous said. Then he goes to the other side, where he can look at it more closely, checking out all the intricate details.

"I sit at the table, I find something a little different every time I look at it," he said.

The idea for the mural came about a couple years ago when Linkous began planning to remodel the board room, which he called "The Dead Presidents Room."

Whenever he sat in a meeting at the head of the table, most of what he saw on the walls was portraits, drawings of the company's previous presidents.

"When a president died, his picture was moved from the hallway to the board room," Linkous, who's been president of one of Harford County's oldest companies for the last 10 years, said. "I was tired of looking at them."

Because the remodel would be significant, Linkous wanted it to be special, and he thought about the company's 175th anniversary approaching in 2017.

His idea was something to depict the history not only of Harford Mutual in the county, but also the history of the county. And he found just the person to do it in Butcher, who had already painted portraits of two of the company's past presidents.

"He was the perfect guy. Not only is he someone who [paints murals], but he's in the county and familiar with the company," Linkous said.

The result of the year-long project is a the mural that graces one of the two longer walls of the conference room. The history starts in the top left corner with the company's first president, James Moore, and flows down and to the right with the company's latest logo, with 175 years of history of the company, Bel Air, Harford County and the country in between.

"We're amazed by it. It exceeded all my expectations," Linkous said. "It really did come together as I thought it would."

For 72-year-old Butcher, the project was an artist's dream.

"They were pleasant to work with, I had no budget and I had no deadline," Butcher said. "That's impossible to find as an artist."

He is proud of the outcome.

"It's an achievement. I know I did what they asked me to do," he said.

Ask him to name his favorite part of the mural and he doesn't have an answer.

"It's like asking who my favorite grandkid is," he said.

The project

This wasn't a project dumped in Butcher's lap. He worked with officials from Harford Mutual every step of the way.

Linkous knew he wanted the different buildings that housed Harford Mutual represented and wanted it to flow from the upper left to the lower right. But how it was done was left to Butcher.

He did a lot of thumbnails that he turned into sketches. He'd bring them to Linkous and others, making changes here and there.

"We worked on it in stages, some things we changed, things moved around," Butcher said. "We took our time, there was no deadline."

Then he did a color painting of the mural in miniature, which hangs in the employees' lunch room in the basement.

Harford Mutual paid Butcher $30,000 to complete the mural, which he said worked out to about "$3 an hour."

"I was so eager to please them. They could have picked anybody," Butcher said. "In my whole career, I've never had anything so big, so satisfying. This could hang on here for hundreds of years. That was inspiring."

After the mini-mural, Butcher built the foundation for the mural then stretched a canvas over the wood. He worked in his "dream studio," a 40-by-40-foot building in his yard that Linkous calls a "dream man cave."

Painting the full-size mural took about five months, Butcher said, adding he spent about 2,100 hours on the project.

The history

Harford Mutual formed its charter in 1842 and on Nov. 23, 2017, will celebrate its 175th anniversary.

"The best we can tell, from everything we've seen, everything we can find, we're the seventh oldest insurance company in operation in the country," Linkous said.

Harford Mutual, which covers seven states and Washington, D.C., in the mid-Atlantic, employs about 150 people and has been growing considerably in the past few years.

Linkous, who has been president for 10 years, has been with Harford Mutual for 31. He started working for the company doing IT when he was 17 years old. He got his degree from the University of Maryland while working at Harford Mutual, going to school at night. And he met his wife, Sandy, there.

"I'm honored to be able to lead the company at this point, at its 174th year and growing," he said.

Harford Mutual made some interesting discoveries, including who its first president, while working on the mural with Butcher.

Company officials always believed James Pinnell was the first president of Harford Mutual.

But when the company was required to look back at its records to see if it had ever insured slaves (it did not, Linkous said), they found out Pinnell was never the company leader.

Staff at the Historical Society of Harford County doing the research found Pinnell was offered the position, but turned it down. They found James Moore held the title of first president.

Pinnell's picture was originally in the upper left corner of the mural, but was replaced by Moore's to be true to the company's history.

The mural

The focal point of the mural is Harford Mutual's building at 200 North Main St. in downtown Bel Air as it stands today, including the wings that were added in 1988.

Ground was broken for the building in 1952 -- a picture and a news story from The Aegis are part of the mural.

Buildings that at one time housed Harford Mutual are also part of the mural, including the before and after of the facade of the building when it was on Office Street, the office at the corner of Courtland and Bond streets and a white building where the company was chartered.

"We don't know exactly where that is, we only know it's in Bel Air," Linkous said of the first home.

The company's history painted in the mural includes a firemark the company has used in various ads throughout the decades, though it's uncertain if the company ever really used one.

A large yew tree winds up the right side of the mural, representing the former Yew Tree Inn, which once stood at today's Harford Mutual location.

Various people from the company's previous mailers and advertisements are part of the painting. Among the more recent items is a picture likely from the 1940s of a group of women who worked at Harford Mutual.

A continuing theme in the mural, and in Harford Mutual history, is its founding year incorporated in its logo. But when a new logo was created in the 2000s, the numbers were removed; 1842 was still discreetly part of the logo.

The time on the clock in the logo is set to 6:42, "which in military time, is 18:42," Linkous said.

Also part of the company logo virtually since the beginning is a safe, which is in the lobby of the Main Street building; it's also part of the mural.

Among the items representing Harford County were a barn fire to represent how the company got started, horses pulling equipment in a field to represent its strong agricultural history, railroad tracks, the old Bel Air train station and the old horse racing track in Bel Air.

Interspersed are events throughout the country's history, including the Civil and Revolutionary wars and World Wars I and II.

"I love it," Linkous said. "This isn't about me, this is about the company."

Fresh new look

The new mural was unveiled for the nine-member board of directors at the company's annual meeting, and they were "wowed by it," Linkous said.

The board members had known the company was working on a large art project.

"Until you physically see it, the 15-by-4-foot painting, you don't really grasp it," Linkous said. "When you see it and it's framed, and it's up on the wall, your first immediate reaction is seeing the building, how prominent it is and all the various aspects of the history of the company and county that just kind of flows to create the building around it."

The pictures of the past company presidents that were in the board room have been hung around the building with other pieces of art, recognitions and portraits.

Butcher's mark, too, is in quite a few places in the Harford Mutual building.

Besides the mural, the mini-mural and portraits of two past presidents, the company recently bought Butcher's original painting of Harford County landmarks when it was auctioned by the Harford County Chamber of Commerce last month.

Butcher painted it for the chamber for its 40th anniversary; Harford Mutual paid $5,000 for it.

"We had a mind we'd like it, given that we have the very large mural from Jim and that Jim did the last two presidential portraits," Linkous said. "There's a history and a connection there. And we are in Harford County, it's in our name."

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