Work In Progress

Next in the Point Pleasant series will be a depiction of George Washington as young man of 19 surveying in the wilderness, arriving
at “..this Pleasant Point”, and meeting with Ben Franklin and others to form the lost colony of Vandalia.

The next mural portrays the leaders of all parties meeting at “Camp Charlotte' to agree on terms and sign the “Treaty of Charlotte”.Two years later, Cornstalk was treacherously murdered at Fort Randolph.

The next few sections show the frontiersmen cutting down the forests, surveying, and settling the new lands.

The last mural is a depiction of a typical Shawnee village of the mid 1700's, with many of the activities, crafts, structures, and people , poignantly illustrates much that was lost after Lord Dunmore's War.

The next mural portrays Daniel Boone and the trading post he built at Point Pleasant, along with trappers, traders, settlers, some frontier buildings and charcters.

The last picture we will paint, which is the first in the series coming from the park, will depict “Mad” Anne Bailey, whose husband was killed in the Battle, who brought the first geese to the Point, and distinguished herself by riding to Charleston and returning with powder to save to frontiesrmen trapped during the Seige of Fort Randolph.

The paintings we are working on in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, illustrate Point Pleasant's role in American History.

Robert Dafford
Point Pleasant
West Virginia Indian Vilage

The murals start by illustrating events in the colonies such as the Boston Tea Party, the Stamp Act and burning tax men in effigy,Lord Dunmore closing of the House of Burgesses, with a background of trouble on the frontier between settlers continually pushing west and Natives pushing back.

Dunmore was forced to call up armies made of many hundreds of militia and volunteer soldiers.

Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetort county raised the southern arm of this force throughout Virginia and the wilds of what is now West Virginia. They met on the Greenbriar River at 'The Levels”, near present day Lewisburg.

We portray the hundreds of soldiers arriving, building storage, shelters, camps, hauling in food, ammunition, supplies, and readying for the campaign.

We illustrate the these groups moving through the wilderness to the Elks River, present day Charleston, setting up camp, resupplying, building boats and rafts, and proceeding down the Kanawa to the Point.

On the morning after their arrival, they were attacked at dawn by a confederation of about a thousand natives led by Cornstalk, war chief of the Shawnee.

Following the Battle scene, painted in 2006, we show Lord Dunmore crossing the Ohio, building Fort Gower, and preparing to march his army of a thousand men to meet Lewis in central Ohio.