Mural #44
Hutto Chamber of Commerce
Hutto, tx
Flowers #1,301 - #1,359 of 10,000
Completed November 2021
Chapter 5… 300 hippos and a cat.
After two full days of driving on the same highway, I finally arrived in the town of Hutto, Texas at 3am. It was immediately obvious that Hutto is a unique town. Even at 3am in the dead of night, I spotted dozens of cement hippo sculptures all over town. No one knows for certain how the town became synonymous with hippos. I heard several stories during my time there but none of them have been proven. One story is that in 1915, a circus hippo escaped from a train that stopped to refuel and made its home in a local river until it’s handlers were able to get it out.
Regardless of how it started, the town of Hutto fully embraced the hippo mascot and she found her way into every corner of the towns design…even flower murals.
We lucked out with timing on this mural. Every year Hutto has their Olde Times Day Festival in the town center. Music, food, art, dance performances, hippos, and for the first time a workshop from the Ten Thousand Flowers Project! I got into town about a week before the event, giving me just enough time to sketch out the design and incorporate a funky flower hippo in the center.
It’s always a challenge when a workshop coincides with a larger event. It’s a little less structured and keeping an eye one everyone becomes the top priority. Luckily, I did have a few volunteers who helped hand out paint cups and make sure everyone was painting inside the lines. By the end of the day there were a few rouge painters that decided other parts of the fence needed color as well but nothing we couldn’t fix with a little sandpaper. As the sun began to set, I packed my things and joined the rest of the town to watch an 80’s rock cover band and drinking Texas Shiner Bock.
A few days later on Halloween night I was putting the final touches on the mural when I was visited by a very friendly stray cat. Whenever I leave for a mural tour, my mom gives me a bag of dry cat food to give to any strays I find along the way. I was finally able to break it open! I gave her a bowl of Friskies and some water thinking she would fill her belly and move on. She didn't. She hung around the fence, circling me for about 20 minutes before I decided she was way too friendly to not belong to someone. The plan was to bring her into the bus for the night and spent the next day looking for her owner. We took a drive to Walmart to pick up a can of wet food, kitty litter and a catnip infused stuffed toy. Little did I know she wouldn’t be staying for just the night…
