DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Bull Durham Advertisement in Goliad County. Now, most treasure gets buried. This piece of Texas history got buried too — just behind a sheet of drywall, where it quietly waited for over a hundred years.
Let's set the scene. It's 1889, and Goliad is about to wake up. The locomotive rolls in, and with it comes a whole new economic reality.
Lumber, brick, stone — materials that used to creak in by wagon, slow and expensive — are now arriving faster and cheaper than anyone had dared to hope. The town starts building. The courthouse square fills out.
And two buildings from that period of tremendous growth right around the turn of the century are going to matter to our story: the Stout-Pettus block, built in 1894, and the W.W. Denham building, put up in 1900. Both of them carry painted walls.
The Denham building wears identical signage front and rear. The Stout-Pettus block boasts two Bull Durham ads — well, it boasts them now. For a long, long time, it only seemed to have walls.
To understand how that bull ended up in Goliad, you've got to go back to Durham, North Carolina, at the end of the Civil War. A tobacco farmer named John Green partnered with a man named W.T. Blackwell, and together they formed the Bull Durham Tobacco Company.
And these fellas had ambition. They sent salesmen traveling the nation — the whole nation — hunting for advertising sites. The method was simple and direct: find the most prominent building in town, pay to have an ad painted on the side, and let the wall do the talking.
It was grassroots marketing at a scale that would make a modern brand manager tip their hat. Somewhere between 1894 and 1900 — that's the window the marker gives us — a Bull Durham salesman came through Goliad, found his prominent wall on the northern section of the Stout-Pettus commercial building, and commissioned a painting. An eight-by-twelve-foot bull.
Bold letters reading: Blackwell's Bull Durham Tobacco has no equal. And then, over the decades, somebody put up sheetrock. Just covered the whole thing right over.
The ad wasn't destroyed — it was just... hidden. Sealed in place. Resting.
Then comes 2012. The building owners remove sections of a damaged interior wall, and there it is. The bull.
Still standing. Still declaring itself without equal. Restoration work began — cleaning, repainting — bringing it back to something close to what those painters left behind.
There's even more painted wall history in Goliad if you know where to look. The W.W. Denham building carries its signage, and out on the northeast corner of Oak and Jefferson Street, a small barn holds an additional extant painted wall advertisement.
The Goliad Bull Durham ad is considered significant as a rare surviving example of early advertising — not just in Texas, but nationwide. Which makes a certain kind of sense. Most things that get covered up, stay covered up.
This one had the good fortune of being sealed inside a solid wall, in a building that lasted, in a town that grew because a train showed up in 1889. Sometimes the wall is the time capsule. And sometimes, you just have to pull down the sheetrock to find out what's been telling you something for over a century.
What the marker says
The town of Goliad began to grow in 1889 with the arrival of the locomotive. The railroads created the ability to receive larger supplies at a lower cost. Lumber, brick, stone and other materials that were formerly shipped by wagon were now available more cheaply and quickly. Two buildings built on the courthouse square during a period of tremendous growth around the turn of the century possess painted walls. The Stout-Pettus block (1894) boasts this Bull Durham ad and one other, and the W.W. Denham building (1900) exhibits identical front and rear signage. An additional extant painted wall advertisement in Goliad is on a small barn on the northeast corner of Oak and Jefferson Street. At the end of the Civil War in Durham, North Carolina, tobacco farmer John Green partnered with W.T. Blackwell in forming the Bull Durham Tobacco Company. Salesmen then traveled the nation looking for advertising sites. After finding the town's most prominent building, they would pay to have an ad painted on the side. The Bull Durham Tobacco ad, assumed to be painted between the years 1894 and 1900, was discovered in 2012 when the building owners removed sections of a damaged interior wall. The sheet rock was obscuring the exterior wall of the northern section of the Stout-Pettus commercial building. The ad was discovered to portray an 8 x 12 foot bull with letters reading, "Blackwell's Bull Durham Tobacco has no equal." Restoration work began on the mural including cleaning and repainting. The Goliad Bull Durham Tobacco advertisement is significant as a rare surviving early advertising example, not only in Texas, but nationwide.