Dell City mural gets makeover, hopes to attract visitors

DELL CITY, Texas (KVIA)—Travelers driving near Dell City will now be greeted by a new mural that was unveiled last week. It celebrates the history, agriculture and people of the Dell Valley.

For decades, multiple signs have welcomed residents and visitors to that area. Due to wear and tear, the most recent sign needed a full restoration.

Grant Spence, the general manager of Dell Telephone Cooperative, coordinated a community effort to bring the mural back to life. The New Zealand native lives closer to El Paso, but he commutes to Dell City frequently.

“Every day as I passed by, I noticed something wrong about it and decided, let's do something to fix that,” he said.

Instead of displaying different images like previous signs, stakeholders decided to go with a hand-painted mural. Spence said he wanted a long-lasting art piece that was not AI-generated.

Cloudcroft mural artist Samantha Odom was selected to design and paint the new artwork.

Odom has worked on several murals, so when she learned about this project, she was excited to assist with the transformation.

Odom designed the artwork and incorporated the area’s most treasured elements. It features the dry desert of Texas, a fierce cougar representing the area’s mascot, the colorful prickly pear, a tractor that represents the farming and ranching community, the Guadalupe Mountains, a cowboy, etc.

“We're just kind of trying to tell all these different things in one piece,” Odom told ABC-7. "It just emanates love and happiness and vibrancy. That's what the colors make the human soul feel."

For eight consecutive nights, Odom worked on the mural for 12-hours at a time.

Spence hopes visitors will notice it and take a moment to stop and reflect.

“’Well, what's that? Let's drive down and take a look.’ And hopefully it will encourage people to come and to visit,” Spence said.

Odom hopes this mural reminds many of home.

“I hope I was able to capture that and that feeling of, ‘Oh, I'm going home. You know, I love to travel the world, but I love coming home.’ So I hope whenever the people of Dell City come through, they see the mural. They have that sigh of relief that they are home.”