This morning’s post on 22 ½ Main Street unleashed a torrent of interesting comments on the undocumented history of blacks in Westport.
It also brought this painting:
An accompanying note from alert “06880” reader Carole Erger-Fass says:
This painting by J. Clinton Shepherd is in the Westport Schools Permanent Arts Collection.
According to Mollie Donovan it was painted during the time he lived in Westport with his family, from the mid 1920s to the late ’30s. In our catalog it is called “The Waffle Shop,” but in the Westport Historical Society post in 2004 for Black History Month it was called “Main Street.”
Maybe your readers will remember the place?
The painting actually spells it “Waffle Shoppe.”
And J. Clinton Shepherd was more than a talented painter in Westport’s artists’ colony.
He also sculpted the doughboy statue that was dedicated on November 11, 1930. It stands now on Veterans Green, opposite Town Hall — just a few yards from long-forgotten 22 ½ Main Street.
Thank you, Carole, for the painting! It was hanging in the Kings Highway Elementary school cafeteria for a couple of years, recently, and I always wondered about it. Wish I’d known about it (and the other paintings hung throughout the building) so I could share those stories with the kids