Bull Durham Advertisement
Goliad, Goliad County, Texas
Marker Inscription
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.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the railroad reached Goliad in 1889, cheap brick, stone, and lumber fueled a building boom around the courthouse square. On the side of the Stout-Pettus block, painted sometime between 1894 and 1900, a traveling sign crew left an enormous Bull Durham tobacco advertisement — an eight-by-twelve-foot bull and the boast that the brand "has no equal." Hidden for decades behind an interior wall, the mural was rediscovered in 2012 and restored, a rare survivor of the era's hand-painted "wall dog" advertising.
Why it matters
Hand-painted wall ads once blanketed American Main Streets; this restored Bull Durham bull is a scarce, tangible relic of how national brands marketed themselves in the age of the railroad.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Goliad's fortunes changed in 1889, when the locomotive arrived. Before the railroad, building materials came slowly and expensively by wagon; afterward, lumber, brick, and stone could be brought in cheaply and in quantity. The result was the kind of confident building boom that swept through countless American towns in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades, and around the turn of the century Goliad's courthouse square filled with substantial new commercial blocks.
Two of those buildings still wear the era on their walls. The Stout-Pettus block went up in 1894 and the W.W. Denham building in 1900 — both from the height of the boom, and both carrying painted wall advertisements. A third painted ad survives on a small barn elsewhere in town.
This was the golden age of the hand-painted wall sign. Before billboards and radio, a brand's reach depended on finding a prominent wall and paying a crew to paint directly onto the brick — a trade whose practitioners were known as "wall dogs." The railroad that built the square also carried the salesmen who came looking for walls to rent.
People & events
The story behind the paint reaches back to Durham, North Carolina, at the close of the Civil War. There, a tobacco farmer named John Green partnered with W. T. Blackwell to form the Bull Durham Tobacco Company. Their brand became one of the most heavily advertised products in the country, and their salesmen fanned out across the nation with a simple method: find a town's most prominent building, and pay to have an advertisement painted on its side.
In Goliad, the wall they chose was the Stout-Pettus block, and the ad is thought to have been painted sometime between 1894 and 1900. It portrayed an eight-by-twelve-foot bull above the boast that "Blackwell's Bull Durham Tobacco has no equal."
Then the ad vanished — not scraped away, but hidden. At some point an interior wall was built or sheetrock installed over it, and the great painted bull disappeared from view for decades. It was rediscovered only in 2012, when the building's owners removed sections of a damaged interior wall and found the mural on the exterior brick behind it. Restoration followed: cleaning the surface and repainting to bring the bull back.
Its place in the American story
For roughly half a century, hand-painted advertisements were part of the visual fabric of American Main Streets. Brands like Bull Durham blanketed the country's brick walls, and the ability to sell a product nationally — the same slogan in a hundred towns — was itself a product of the railroad age, when goods and salesmen alike could travel fast and far.
Most of those painted walls are gone. Weather, demolition, repainting, and time erased the overwhelming majority of them, which is exactly what makes Goliad's bull remarkable: it survives, and the marker notes it as a rare example not only in Texas but nationwide. The very thing that once seemed a misfortune — being sealed behind a wall — is what preserved it, shielding the paint from the sun and rain that destroyed its contemporaries.
So the mural is a double artifact. It documents how a national brand marketed itself in the era of the railroad, and it documents the everyday craft of the sign painters whose work once shouted from every prominent corner in America.
If you visit
Stand back far enough to take in the whole bull. At eight by twelve feet it was built to be read from across a busy square, and its scale is part of its message — this was outdoor advertising in an age before neon, meant to catch the eye of anyone passing through.
Look closely and you can read the era in the surface itself. Restoration brought the image back, but a painted wall ad more than a century old carries its history in every faded patch and weathered brick. Because the mural spent decades sealed behind an interior wall, it survived where countless others were lost, and knowing that makes the paint feel less like decoration and more like a message that outlasted the people who left it.
Goliad's courthouse square is the kind of place best explored on foot, and this wall rewards a slow look. A third surviving painted ad exists elsewhere in town on a small barn — a reminder that these signs were once everywhere, and that spotting a survivor is one of the quiet pleasures of a historic Main Street.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Green
- · W.T. Blackwell
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McFaddin Mercantile
McFaddin, TX
When a railroad line pushed through the McFaddin Ranch around 1900, a ranch settlement — briefly renamed Marianna by the railroad — sprang up with a depot, post office, church, and school. This board-and-batten mercantile, built in 1910, became the community's gathering place and for a time housed the post office. Its simple, sturdy design typifies the small-town general stores that anchored rural Texas commerce.
Bee County
Pettus, TX
Carved largely from San Patricio County in 1857 and organized in 1858, Bee County took its name from Barnard E. Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war, secretary of state, and minister to the United States. A cattle region since Spanish colonial times, it became an important beef producer after 1865 and gained its first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, in 1886. Oil was discovered here in 1929, and the county seat has been at Beeville since 1860.
Home County of William Pinckney McLean
Victoria, TX
A Victoria lawyer elected to the legislature in 1861 and to Congress from 1872 to 1874, William Pinckney McLean was appointed by Governor James S. Hogg to the newly created Railroad Commission of Texas, serving from 1891. First charged with regulating shipping rates, the Commission soon took on oil and gas—pipelines in 1917, conservation in 1919, and full regulation in the 1930s, when East Texas poured out 1.7 million barrels a day and martial law enforced its rules.
Site of Southern Pacific Railroad Depot
Victoria, TX
The railroad remade Victoria's fortunes, and this was the site of its grand two-story Southern Pacific depot, built in 1888–89 after the New York, Texas & Mexican line pushed track into town and made it a headquarters. With waiting rooms and ticket offices below and division offices above, the depot handled passengers and freight and doubled as a place for the community to gather. Passenger service ended in 1953 and the building, though used into 1979, burned in 1984—leaving only its memory as an engine of the town's growth.