The Bethesda Post Office mural, titled “Montgomery County Farm Women’s Market,” was installed in 1939 as part of the New Deal’s Treasury Section of Fine Arts program, which commissioned artworks to enrich federal buildings during the Great Depression.

Painted for the 1938 Wisconsin Avenue post office in downtown Bethesda, the mural depicts local farm women feeding animals on one side and selling produce on the other, evoking the nearby Farm Women’s Cooperative Market that opened on Wisconsin Avenue in 1932. This imagery anchored the new federal building in the life of a once-rural community that was rapidly suburbanizing.

The mural’s commissioning drew attention at the highest levels of government. On December 12, 1938, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt personally visited the Treasury’s Procurement Division to review Robert Gates’s sketch for the Bethesda mural, calling it “charming” in her diary and praising post office art for increasing public appreciation of decorative and artistic values. Her endorsement underscored the federal belief that public art could both provide work for artists and cultivate civic pride during hard economic times.

Robert Franklin Gates, born in Detroit in 1906, trained at the Detroit School of Arts and Crafts, the Art Students League of New York, and the Phillips Gallery Art School in Washington, D.C., before emerging as a prominent New Deal muralist.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s he received several Treasury Section commissions, with the Bethesda mural as his first post office work, followed by Old Time Camp Meeting in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and Buckwheat Harvest in Oakland, Maryland. After World War II he joined American University’s faculty, eventually chairing the art department from 1953 to 1957, and became a central figure in Washington’s mid‑century art scene.

When the historic Bethesda post office was sold and postal operations consolidated, the Gates mural was removed to Postal Service storage, raising fears it might be lost. After a 17‑month absence, the work was restored to public view in the Bethesda–Chevy Chase Regional Services Center, preserving a rare local example of Depression‑era federal art and Gates’s legacy in Montgomery County.

Among the resources on the Web about the mural and Robert Gates are:

Post Office Art
Off The Wall: New Deal Post Office Murals
Another New Deal post office, sold and soon to close
New Deal Art Along Highway 219 (Robert Gates)
Robert Franklin Gates Archives
American University Museum lecture on the paintings and watercolors of Robert Franklin Gates (YouTube video)