Syracuse history unfolds from past to present through scenes of community life, transportation, farming, recreation, weather disasters, and public buildings. The past appears in softer colors and the present in more intense ones, with seasons running from left to right. Among the scenes are an old street scene, modern farms, an athletic field, covered wagons, old cars, modern cars and trucks, snowmobiles, ice skating on Doc's pond where ice was cut and stored for summer, sleighs used for fun, a Christmas scene with the town and water tower lit up, a racetrack where harness racing was popular in the 1890's and where 150 horses were once boarded, the county fair begun in 1873, the Good Samaritan Home built in 1967, stagecoaches, a firehouse built in 1895, church steeples representing all churches, modern homes, the Alexander House built in the 1880's at 4th and Poplar, the Junior High School built in 1942, the Senior High School built in 1965, the old mill built in 1868 on the Nemaha, an airplane, the swimming pool built in 1961, the depot and trains, a gazebo in the former park at the new site of Luther Memorial Church, the golf course dedicated in 1967, combines that made farming big business, Otoe Indians whose name the county bears, wagon trains of which 7,365 freight wagons passed through in 1865, the hospital built in 1951 as a community project, the first location of Syracuse southwest of town known for its lilacs, electric power, contour farming to control flood and erosion, sodbusters breaking and planting the prairie, an old farm house, soil conservation, an old school house used from 1890 to 1941, a flood when the Little Nemaha went wild in 1950, and a modern street scene. The history also recalls repeated blizzards, especially the worst in 1888, the grasshopper plague whose worst year was 1873, a dark shadow for tornado, and fires in 1996 and 1997. The mural was restored in 1993 and 2011.