COLLIERVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - It took two months of research and another month of painting before Evelina Dillon managed to pack 150 years of Collierville history onto a 40-by-40-inch canvas.
The gazebo on Town Square - Collierville’s most recent gazebo, since over the years there have been three - is front-and-center in the painting, featuring the musicians who participate in “pickin’ & grinnin’” on Friday and Saturday nights.
Just below is Frisco locomotive No. 1351, pictured as it is stationed on the tracks at Town Square.
Created for Collierville’s 150th anniversary, the painting was revealed at Town Hall on Monday (Feb. 17).
For Dillon, a first-generation immigrant from Uzbekistan who has lived in the Collierville area since fall 2014, it is her hope that the painting will show what the people of Collierville have created over the last 150 years. Even when challenges arose - like the tornado painted over the gazebo or the boll weevil that destroyed the cotton industry - the people of Collierville stepped up and overcame.
“I hope people are excited, the people that built this city,” Dillon said. “There was one time right after the Civil War where the whole city was demolished. Each person who lived on each street had to fix their own street. If you lived on yours, you’re fixing the whole thing. Otherwise, you couldn’t go anywhere. Nobody was making you do it.”
And they built or brought back everything represented in her painting.
The town’s bright red double-decker bus brought over from London is there, a laptop featuring a FedEx plane to represent one of the town’s largest employers, the bed-and-breakfast that is also the oldest house in Collierville since it survived the city being burned during the Civil War.
Four of Collierville’s original churches are featured, including the Baptist one on the square that no longer exists. Both the new and old high schools are represented as is a bright red Collierville Dragon.
The hardest part of the painting was the research, Dillon said. Clarene Pinkston Russell’s book “Collierville, Tennessee, Her People and Neighbors” provided a basis for much of it.
The book was fascinating, Dillon said, introducing her to many aspects of the town’s history - far too much to include in the painting.
Ultimately, she tried to include features of the town that were well-known or had great significance, representing different aspects and eras of Collierville history, she said.
It was like a puzzle to fit all the pieces together, Dillon said. She sketched different buildings and events, then moved them around five to six times to see how they fit or what size they should be.
The painting came easier.
Above it all snakes the Wolf River, which she described as “the heart of Collierville.”
Dillon has created paintings to commemorate cities and events before. In 2019, she won the Memphis in May Fine Art Poster contest for the bicentennial celebration for the city of Memphis.
In 2017, she won a contest organized by The Friends of the Morton Museum to benefit the restoration of the Frisco locomotive #1351.
Then Collierville residents went door-to-door selling prints of that painting, she said. When they did so, she saw the same initiative as those who rebuilt their town years ago.
“People just did it,” she said. “They’re still that way.”
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