Editor’s Note: This article contains an image of a painting that depicts violence against Indigenous people.

In north suburban Des Plaines, an old post office is decorated with a mural that depicts a white settler brutally attacking an Indigenous man.

The subject matter makes it difficult to argue for saving the painting, along with another in the building, as modern redevelopment of downtown Des Plaines endangers the murals.

The suburb has evolved over the past few decades, with mid-rise buildings springing up among quaint mainstay homes. The march of the mid-rises is now at the northwest edge of the downtown area. A developer, Compasspoint, has deals to buy a few parcels on Graceland Avenue and put up a seven-story, 131-unit building there.

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One of the properties Compasspoint would acquire, 622 Graceland Ave., is the former Des Plaines post office. The 1940 structure, like many post offices of the Depression era, was decorated inside with murals commissioned by the federal government.

The murals are two panels on different walls. The Death of Pere Marquette, dated 1940, depicts Father Jacques Marquette dying in May 1675. Marquette’s skin has a deathly, chalk white pallor. His head is cradled by a fur trapper, his feet by an Indigenous woman. Sitting by his side, arms outstretched as if calling down a blessing, is an Indigenous man.

But then you look to the left and see the other mural, Conquest of the Prairie Lands, painted in 1947. It’s as violent as the first mural is quiet. A white settler holds a sharp-pointed tool, ready to stab the Native man he’s subduing. Behind and beneath the men is a white woman, dead or unconscious on the ground near broken wagon wheels. On one side, Native dwellings are in flames, and on the other are approaching wagons from white settlers.

Both were painted by the same man, James Michael Newell, a New York-based muralist working for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.

A writer for The Living New Deal, an organization that researches New Deal public works, concluded Newell is saying Indigenous people treated white people with compassion, but were later repaid with brutality.

These murals today still look fresh and clean, with no cracks or other damage.

Their condition is thanks in part to the Wessell family, newspaper publishers since 1947. Since the mid-1980s, the former post office has been the headquarters for the Wessells’ chain of newspapers that cover Des Plaines, Arlington Heights, Rosemont and several other northwest suburbs.

Todd Wessell, managing editor and third generation of the family, said he has spent nearly his whole life in that building. Over the years, he’s gotten used to people commenting on the mural, which he described as “brutal.” But he said the family would like both paintings to be saved, even if they’re just put in storage somewhere.

Todd’s father, Tom, who owns the building with his two brothers, said of the image of a Native man being bludgeoned, “the way I look at it, it was art and who am I to say it isn’t art? We all understand that it shows something that is abhorrent to some people, but the artist was very well-respected in his day.”

Todd Wessell said his family’s deal to sell the building to Compasspoint doesn’t include any provision to keep the murals. Wessell said he and his father hope to be able to arrange to save the murals, but they’ve made little progress. David Gates, a Crystal Lake aficionado of New Deal post offices and murals, has been waging a campaign to bring attention to the Des Plaines building and murals, but with the city’s approval of the sale in August, there’s not much left he can do.

In 1940, when Newell was painting The Evolution of Western Civilization at Evander Childs High School in Bronx, New York, he was praised by Holger Cahill, the head of the Federal Art Project. In a newspaper article that was reprinted in papers all over the country, Cahill, who was overseeing the work of thousands of artists, said Newell’s work at Evander Childs was powerful enough to make the Bronx the world capital of murals.

But that mural also later became controversial for depicting Black people picking cotton. In the late 1990s, the school added new murals by students to broaden the population depicted on the walls.

In Dolgeville, New York, which before the Civil War had two stops on the Underground Railroad, Newell’s 1940 post office mural depicts a white citizen holding a lamp as people fleeing enslavement pass from the town into the darkness.

For the Department of the Interior, Newell’s two murals on the sixth floor show the products and people of the Virgin Islands and Alaska.

All of those were painted before World War II. After the war, he returned to Des Plaines to add that second panel, showing a Native man about to be slain by a white settler.

Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him @Dennis_Rodkin.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him @true_chicago.