Nine murals in the Hernando Courthouse portray regional history through scenes of Hernando de Soto and the French explorers Bienville, Marquette, and Joliet. Commissioned for Memphis's Gayoso Hotel, they hung there from 1903 to 1948 and were the largest canvases ever painted by American muralist Newton Alonzo Wells, as well as some of the oldest surviving murals in the southeastern United States. In 1948, during Fred Goldsmith's renovation of the Gayoso Hotel into Goldsmith's Department Store, the Goldsmith family gave the murals to Hernando after the town's mayor requested them. The town raised $5,000 to repair and install them in the courthouse rotunda in 1953, and artists recaptured their original grandeur. The paintings have since been restored three times, in the 1950s, the 1970s, and again in 2002, under the guidance of an art restorer, and they now have a combined appraised value of over $1 million. Among notable moments in their history, Huey Long was married beneath one of them at the Gayoso Hotel in 1913, and they appeared in a 1963 episode of Route 66 filmed in Hernando. A related image of Hernando de Soto at the Mississippi River is noted as inaccurate for showing Southeastern Indians in teepees, although they actually lived in wooden buildings with mud-daub walls and thatched roofs. The broader First Contact Trail interprets the historical, cultural, and social changes that followed de Soto's arrival as the first documented European to see and cross the Mississippi River near present-day DeSoto County in 1541.