‘We’re a part of Wheaton’: Professor and former student create mural that chronicles city’s past

Take a walk behind the frying apple cider doughnuts and artisan wares at Wheaton’s busy and popular Saturday morning French Market and you’ll see familiar images of the city’s past: Red Grange, Cock Robin, the Grand Theater.

On this new 272-foot mural, you will also see tributes to the people, places and things who were among the first to inhabit the area: mastodons, marshland filled with grasses and cattails, and geometric patterns and designs inspired by Ojibwe and Potawatomi cultural artifacts.

The public art piece, at the downtown plaza near Main Street and Liberty Drive, is an artist depiction of the city’s history in chronological form. It’s the creation of Jeremy Botts and Jeffrey Swider-Peltz — the former, an art professor at Wheaton College, and the latter, one of his old students.

“This mural was really meaningful for us because we’re a part of Wheaton,” Swider-Peltz said Saturday during a formal public unveiling of the mural.

The pair was selected by the city’s fine and cultural arts commission and city council to add onto the “Wheaton” mural created two years ago by artist Peru Dyer Jalea (better known as Peru143).

Their addition — on a formerly gray retaining wall next to the plaza — spells out “Your Hometown,” but you have to look closely.

“Those letters are presented in historically chronological typefaces and lettering styles. So the first one you’ll see here is a Y — a very fancy early American fraktur, around from the 1770s,” said Botts, during an hourlong talk dozens attended Saturday. “We did research and looked at lettering styles, and so about every 20 or 30 years you’ll see a jump from letter to letter. It’s a bit of a puzzle.”

Botts, who teaches design at the college, is the son of a calligrapher, “so I grew up with lettering all around me,” he says.

Swider-Peltz, a former speedskater for the USA national team, is the son of four-time Olympian Nancy Swider-Peltz Sr., and his dad, Jeff, is a longtime football coach at Wheaton College.

Needless to say, athletic competition runs in the family.

So when Swider-Peltz looks at his painting of Red Grange, he recalls running in the track and field meet named after Wheaton’s famous “Galloping Ghost.”

“Did any of you run that race?” he asked the crowd on the mural tour. “You had to see how many laps you could do within an hour. And my family’s really competitive. I ran so hard for an hour, and it was brutal. I dreaded it every single year.”

“Well, the Galloping Ghost was faster than me,” he quipped.

The two artists collaborated on the design across different time zones and continents; they worked out of a digital file while Botts was on sabbatical in India for three months. Then they used graphite tracing paper — and some freehand — to transfer everything onto the wall.

“It was a very difficult design to work on,” Botts said. “It’s about 5 1/2 feet to 6 feet tall, but 272 feet wide. So you can imagine what that looks like on a computer screen. So we had to work on it in sections, and then also think about how those sections connected to one another.”

The paint job took about three months — slowed by heavy rains in June and hot weather in July — but they also got help from four college students.

The effort began nearly a year ago after city officials put out a call for artists to detail the city’s history, in conjunction with the commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary.

Eight others applied and offered initial design concepts, and the arts commission narrowed it to three.

“But these guys were perfect, because they’re from here,” said Randy King, one of the commission members. “No one understands Wheaton better than people that grew up here.”