NORWAY – Scores of people stand in line each day in the Post Office lobby under one of the town’s hidden artistic treasures – a wood relief titled “Norway’s first Postal Rider” – without even noticing it.

“I probably look to see if someone’s at the window first,” said Marion Howe, who for years has stood under the wood relief of her grandfather’s father, Jacob Howe, the first postal rider in Norway, without realizing its significance to her own family history.

The carving of Howe by Bangor artist Margaret Vincent was sponsored and commissioned under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture in 1934. The program was designed to decorate public buildings with art of high quality to make it accessible for all people. In Maine, there are 12 public buildings, almost all post offices, housing these works of art which include oil paintings, plaster reliefs and wood reliefs.

There are only three Post Office wood reliefs left in Maine, including Norway’s and the 1938 “Lillian Nordica,” that hangs in the Farmington Post Office.

“It’s right up over my door,” said Farmington Postmaster Dick Knight. The wood relief, sculptured by Hetty Beatty, is engraved with “1859-1914,” which Knight believes are the birth and death dates of Lillian Nordica, a Farmington native who became a world-renowned opera singer.

The artist at work

Little is known about Norway’s piece of art, which hangs above the office door of Postmaster Jim McCartney.

What is known about Vincent’s work was recently uncovered through the efforts of Norway Historical Society curator Charles Longley and librarians at the Bangor Public Library who found Bangor Daily News articles that provide insight into how the artist created her work.

The wood relief of Jacob Howe was carved with a knife and chisel on the floor of a small studio on Broad Street in Bangor in 1942. A Bangor Daily News reporter who interviewed Vincent in May of that year described the scene in her studio:

“The wet cheesecloth taken from the old post rider’s clay face revealed a dashing athletic figure astride a spirited horse surrounded by a vaguely etched background of pine trees and galloping over a stony post-Revolutionary Maine road.

“A horn rais(ed) to his lips, Howe was depicted approaching a post office or tavern, surrounding the call which brought townspeople out by the score to get the mail.”

Vincent told the reporter that she carved the figure in linden wood because it was one of the toughest woods around and used as far back as Noah’s ark, referring to biblical times.

“It doesn’t crack or check and takes a wonderful finish,” she said.

Vincent knew a great deal about her subject, according to the account in the Bangor Daily News. Howe served three years in the Revolutionary War and lived in Norway and Paris. He died in Paris. His route as Norway’s first postal rider carried him from Portland through Gorham, Baldwin, Standish and Fryeburg, ending in Norway.

‘A colorful, pleasant lady’

Vincent was born in the northern Maine town of Houlton but traveled extensively, spending four years in Alaska with her husband, Ernest Stockeler, who once analyzed photographs taken by NASA spacecraft.

She spent many years in Bangor presenting her nationally known works, which included sculptures. Sometime after her husband’s death in the 1970s, she moved back to Aroostook County.

She died in Caribou on Nov. 29, 1998, at the Maine Veterans Home. Today her home, a small wooden-framed house, sits desolate on a section of Route 1 in Caribou.

“She was a colorful, very pleasant lady,” recalled Caribou City Clerk Judy Corrow who met her in City Hall on occasion. She never mentioned her artwork.

Along with the wood relief, the Norway Post Office owns a second piece of artwork that is attributed to the Treasury Department’s art program. “Christmas in Norway” is listed by the U.S. Postal Service as being created in 1942 by local artist Lee Bean.

That assertion, however, cannot be true, said Aranka Matolcsy, director of the Western Maine Art Group which was founded in 1965 by her father, Lajos Matolcsy. “She didn’t start studying art until the late 1960s,” she said of Bean. “We did a reproduction of it.”

The original work was believed to be commissioned as a reproduction for a postage stamp. Research into that piece of art continues, Matolcsy said.