By Robert H. Hanson
LOGANVILLE, Ga. | The illustration on the Sept. 16, 2025 edition of the GwinnettForum (below) is a painting done by Wilbur G. Kurtz for the Coca-Cola Company in 1942. It depicts Jacob’s Pharmacy, the drugstore where the beverage was first served in 1886.
Wilbur Kurtz was an unusual combination of artist and historian. He was born in Illinois in 1882, first visited Atlanta in 1903, moved to Atlanta in 1907, and died in Atlanta in 1967.
He met William A Fuller, the conductor on the train hauled by the locomotive General on the day in 1862 that it was stolen by Union spies, setting in motion what became known as The Great Locomotive Chase. They discussed not only Civil War history, but the history and geography of Atlanta in that era.
He later married Fuller’s daughter, Annie Laurie Fuller.
Kurtz was interested in history in general, and specifically Civil War history as it pertained to the Atlanta area. Someone wrote that he became more Southern than most Southerners.
In the early 1900s he interviewed many elderly people who had been alive during the Civil War, getting details about buildings, transportation, and everyday life in Atlanta at the time. He took notes and based his paintings on the information gleaned from these interviews. The result was a number of paintings that were, perhaps, the most accurate portrayal of Atlanta scenes during its history, short of an actual photograph.
Kurtz was a technical advisor on such motion pictures as Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, and The Great Locomotive Chase and was a consultant on the restoration of the locomotive Texas prior to its placement in the Cyclorama in the 1930s. (This carefully studied restoration was scrapped in favor of a later – 1880’s – appearance, much to the chagrin of your writer.)
Two Georgia governors commissioned paintings by Kurtz, one of which was a gift to President Lyndon B. Johnson and hung on a wall at his LBJ Ranch in Texas. Johnson’s great-grandfather had moved to Texas from Georgia.
Wilbur G. Kurtz died in Atlanta on February 18, 1967, a few days short of his 85th birthday, and was interred at Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery.
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