Stand at the corner of Church Street and Center Street on a weekday morning and you can see two versions of Lakeland at once. Turn one way and a fresh coat of color covers what used to be a blank parking lot wall, painted this past July. Turn the other and, a few blocks over, life-size figures in 1920s dress still stand against brick facades, paint fading in places where South Georgia summers have had nearly three decades to work on them. Both are murals. Both carry the same civic label. But they were not made the same way, by the same people, or for the same reason, and that difference tells you more about how this town actually renews itself than either mural does on its own.
How One Wall Earned a Governor's Proclamation
Lakeland's mural identity did not start as a branding exercise. It started with one commission. In 1998, local resident Nell Patten Roquemore hired Ralph Waldrop and Billy Love, two muralists from Columbia, South Carolina, to paint the first of what would become more than thirty life-size wall paintings across downtown. The murals depict real citizens from the era around 1925, the year the town's name changed from Milltown to Lakeland. Mural number 33, for example, shows William Hughes and his wife Elizabeth seated on a bench behind the old R. L. Patten & Son store. Hughes was known locally as Uncle Billy, a farmer and longtime member of Old Union Primitive Baptist Church, and his mural is one of dozens that turn downtown into something closer to a photo album than a tourist backdrop.
The scale of that project got official recognition in 2006, when Governor Sonny Perdue visited and issued a proclamation naming Lakeland the state's Historical Mural City. That title has stuck for two decades. The Lakeland-Lanier County Chamber of Commerce still maintains a self-guided tour, and visitors can scan a QR code at each mural site to hear the real story behind the person painted on the wall. It is a rare thing for a town this size to have a documented, artist-attributed public art collection with individual biographies attached to each piece.
The Part Nobody Advertised
What the 2006 proclamation does not account for is what happens to thirty-year-old exterior paint in a region that sees regular tropical storm activity. Recent years brought damage to several of the historic murals, the kind of wear that does not make headlines but slowly changes how a downtown looks and feels. The Mural City title stayed on the welcome signs. The murals underneath it did not all stay in the same condition that earned the title in the first place.
This is the part of the story that matters if you live here and have not thought about the murals in years beyond the occasional drive past one. The town's answer to that quiet erosion was not a restoration campaign aimed at the original thirty. It was something else entirely.
Two New Murals, Built by a Different Room Than the First
In spring 2026, a new mural went up on the NAPA building on East Main Street, on the east side of town, the kind of gateway spot drivers pass coming into Lakeland. It reads "Welcome to Lakeland, Georgia" and within two weeks of completion it had become one of the more talked-about sights in the county, with people making a point of stopping on East Main Street to see it. The project came together through Drawing Dawgs, a youth-focused art program, with organizer Jennifer Legg Stewart leading the effort from early planning through the final brushstrokes. It was framed openly as a fresh start after the storm damage to the older murals, not a fix for them.
Then in July 2026, a second new mural was completed a few blocks away, at the corner of Church Street and Center Street, on a parking lot wall tied to Ivey & Dencie's Properties LLC. This one was painted by Trista Miller, an art student at Valdosta State University, with help from fellow VSU students and from Kenli Stewart, a student at Lanier County High School. The wall space itself came through Lakeland Drug Company, a downtown business that made the location available for the project.
Set the two eras side by side and the contrast is not subtle. The original murals came from a single patron commissioning two professional, out-of-town artists to paint historically researched portraits of named local citizens. The new murals came from a youth arts program, a college art student, a high schooler, and two small businesses donating wall space, painting scenes that are decorative and welcoming rather than biographical. One era was built to document who Lakeland used to be. The other is being built by whoever is willing to pick up a brush and whoever owns a wall worth painting.
What This Actually Means for the Next Thirty Murals
The useful thing to understand as a resident is that Lakeland's Mural City identity was never really about the specific thirty paintings from 1998 onward. It survived storm damage and fading paint not because the town fixed what broke, but because a completely different group of people decided the label was worth adding to rather than repairing. That is a meaningful distinction if you care about what downtown will look like in another ten years. The historic murals are a fixed collection tied to a specific place and time. The new murals are an open invitation, and if the pattern from 2026 holds, it depends on local businesses offering wall space and local students and artists showing up to use it, not on any single funding source or professional muralist being hired again.
If you have lived here long enough to stop noticing the historic murals on your daily route, this is a good year to look again, both at the ones that have been there since before some of your neighbors were born and at the two new ones that just went up a few blocks apart.
Where to See Both Eras This Weekend
- The self-guided historic mural tour starts at the Lakeland-Lanier County Chamber of Commerce office, known locally as the Welcome Center, where you can pick up a printed map or scan the QR codes posted at individual murals around downtown.
- The "Welcome to Lakeland, Georgia" mural sits on the NAPA building on East Main Street, on the east side of town, easy to catch heading in or out on that route.
- The newest mural is on the parking lot wall at the corner of Church Street and Center Street, close enough to the historic downtown core to pair with a walk past several of the older murals in the same trip.
Lakeland earned its nickname once, with one artist's commission and a governor's signature. Whether it keeps earning it now depends on a rotating cast of students, volunteers, and business owners willing to keep a blank wall from staying blank for long. That is a more interesting story than a preserved collection, and it is one worth paying attention to if you plan on living here long enough to see what goes up next.
If you are weighing a move within Lakeland, or thinking about what a home near this kind of downtown activity is actually worth, Rachelle Anderson has spent her career learning South Georgia block by block, not just listing by listing. Let's Connect.
