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In June, The Sentinel visited with Debbie Cornman as she painted a mural on a silo off Route 174 belonging to South Middleton Township resident Glenn Peffer.

The mural is now finished, and Cornman says it led her to plan a similar project on a larger scale.

By Heather Stauffer, Sentinel Reporter, January 12, 2009

Last updated: Monday, January 12, 2009 1:56 PM EST

In general, Glenn Peffer says, the mural that Debbie Cornman painted on his silo in South Middleton Township this summer is intended to remind people driving by on Route 174 of a simpler, more agrarian era.

But for him, Peffer says, the mural he titled “A Moment In Time” also evokes specific memories of some remarkable animals.

The front cow is Jan, he says, a registered Holstein who was grand champion of the Pennsylvania Farm Show in 1968. And the first one behind her is Lucy, who at $1,850 was the highest-priced cow in the state in 1983.

“She was the first cow that sold in Pa. that went to California,” Peffer says. There were few registered cattle out West at that point, he said, and a California farmer decided he wanted good and fresh blood enough to fly in to find Lucy and then ship her to his farm by rail.

That wasn’t the end of Lucy’s legacy, Peffer says, because her great-great-grandson was in a breeding program that reached 50 foreign countries.

“They were quite unique -- something special,” says Peffer, who at 80 is now retired from active farming.

He’s also interested in human history, pointing out that his uncle, William Henry Peffer, was the one who purchased The Valley Sentinel, which had been a weekly Shippensburg paper, in 1866 and moved it to Carlisle, where it dropped the “Valley.”

Even for those who are not aware of the bovine history associated with the mural, Peffer says, it has attracted attention.

“A lot of people pull in there, stop and turn around,” Peffer says. He’s glad to see that, he says, and hopes it reminds people of the way things used to be.

“I think we’re losing our rural heritage,” Peffer says, noting that in the 1960s and 1970s there were about 145 dairy farms in the area. Today, he says, it’s down to about 29.

“She did a nice job,” Peffer says of Cornman. “We get a lot of comments.”

Cornman, who worked on the mural off and on from June through early September, using about two gallons of latex paint and sizing graphs, says she is very happy with the final result.

After finishing “A Moment In Time,” Cornman painted a much smaller mural in the basement of an area home and now says she’s in the process of planning a mural for a wing of Claremont Nursing and Rehabilitation Services, owned by Cumberland County.

“I’m going to be painting kind of a water seashore landscape,” Cornman says. The wall is 53 feet wide, she says, and the county is envisioning something that will be both attractive and soothing to the residents.

“Because it’s so long, we’re going to try to focus in on a morning section, day section and evening section,” she says.

She’ll have a challenge making them flow into one another, she says, explaining that doing murals means making adjustments to her normal techniques.

“The dimensions are absolutely humongous,” she says jokingly. “You have to stand back and look at it .... Sometimes it looked like I wasn’t doing much.”