Washington Post: The U.S. Postal Service is home to thousands of historic works of art in post offices nationwide. Hundreds have been lost, sold or destroyed.

To lift the United States out of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt put Americans to work building roads and bridges, conserving forests and rivers, laying sewer pipes, and constructing schools, parks and airports.

But the U.S. needed something more, Roosevelt thought. It needed art. So his White House built a national gallery and museum, then scattered the works around the country, placing dazzling murals and sculptures in hundreds of post offices. The works brought visibility — and crucial paychecks — to the artists, and lifted morale during the depths of the Depression and the Second World War.

The vast majority of the works survive nearly a century later, but hundreds are missing or have been destroyed, sold or donated, according to U.S. Postal Service records obtained by The Washington Post. In recent years, senior postal officials weighed covering remaining images that some people find offensive — often those depicting Black labor.

Of the nearly 1,700 post office murals installed under Roosevelt’s New Deal program, nearly 200 are missing. Dozens more have been conveyed to other federal agencies, local governments, museums and nonprofits.

For many of the destroyed murals nationwide, the best surviving depictions of the work are photographs The Post obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The Smithsonian American Art Museum also has a large collection of studies of the murals; other records reside at the National Archives.

Read more: The disappearing art gallery in your post office – The Washington Post