Just read that President Bush has some Western art in the Oval Office . One of the paintings is by W.H.D. Koerner . In the Archives at Wells Fargo, we have a Koerner —well, sorta.

Once upon a time, someone got hold of some loose pages from a 1916 edition of Harper's Monthly Magazine . The pages are a story, "Ann Eliza Weatherby's Trip to Town" by Muriel Campbell Dyar. The story features two drawings by Koerner, including "The stage stopped before them in a cloud of dust."

Someone—that is, we—kept the pages as a clipping for the research files. (A beautiful illustration of the stagecoach is the sort of thing that grabs our eye here at Wells Fargo History.) Anyway, it's nice that we have this offhand connection with the Oval Office .

When Wells Fargo and Co. opened for business in July 1852, the president of the United States was Millard Fillmore . Fillmore found the White House had no books when he took office, so he started an official White House Library. Paradoxically, he was offered an honorary degree from Oxford later in life, but turned it down because he didn't feel he had the actual education to warrant the honor.

Fillmore is also connected to the greatest piece of historical fiction ever—the bathtub hoax . H.L. Mencken , a legendary humorist, wrote an article about the origins of the bathtub and credited Fillmore with a key role. It was a joke, done by Mencken for laughs. But it became THE story about the origins of the bathtub—no matter how often it was debunked.

Hmmmmm ... From art to the White House to a bathtub, all from a Wells Fargo blog. Amazing how art inspires the imagination. Or I'm just nuts—take yer pick.

All the same, really.