After Pat Mercer Hutchens painted an old Great Falls house that was slated for demolition, a local paper ran a story about the building and it was saved. That was about a decade ago. Now, that house is Dante’s Ristorante, and Hutchens has since made dozens of paintings of historic locations around Great Falls and the surrounding region.

Many of those paintings were on display at the Great Falls Library for the last month, and several now comprise a permanent exhibit at the Tavern at Great Falls.

"I’ve always had an interest in preserving things like that," she said. But at the time that she painted the house that would later become a Great Falls institution, she primarily painted old cars instead of buildings, with a long series of large construction artwork that used paint, found objects and other media to depict head-on views of cars from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. That came to an end after the 9-11 attacks.

Hutchens was deeply affected by an article she read about the people who chose to jump from the World Trade Center towers as they burned and fell. "I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I couldn’t sleep for days," she said. She created a work depicting two of those people. After completing the piece, she said, "I pretty much went into hibernation for a while and then started painting local things."

WHAT BEGAN as a series of 20 paintings became 50 paintings, and then 70. "I just got into it and I never stopped," she said.

Many of her subjects are structures slated to be torn down. Others have long vanished or have crumbled or been rebuilt but are depicted in old drawings or photographs.

For these, Hutchens uses some imagination. "You can’t find anything 100 years old in color," she said. "You have to come up with the colors and put in trees, bushes, all sorts of things." Other additions may include her grandchildren, who she painted sitting on the steps of McKay’s General Store in Great Falls. "The house is still there," she said. "It’s been completely redone."

In a painting of the house that once stood where the Olivers Corner commercial area is now located, at the intersection of Walker Road and Georgetown Pike, she inserted Fantastic, a horse from the Great Falls-based Lift Me Up therapeutic riding program. And an old-time car of the sort she used to paint appears in, among others, a picture of the Triangle Store that once stood at Triangle Corner, now Seneca Square Shopping Center. Another features prominently in a picture of Tysons Corner in the 1950s. "These two little stores were the only thing there," Hutchens said, indicating her rendition of a filling station and a small neighboring shop.

Most of the cars in her paintings are candy-apple red. Most of the roads are dirt, and most of the scenes are surrounded by empty fields or forest. "This was all country out here. You had to come on a dirt road to get here," Hutchens said.

One building Great Falls residents might be familiar with, even if they don’t recognize it in Hutchens’ painting, is an old Texaco station off Leesburg Pike in the Herndon area. "Half the people in this area go to Dranesville Auto to get their car fixed," she said, noting that the gas station’s building had been expanded to several times its original size to house the auto repair shop. In her painting, a small, primitive-looking pickup truck sits in front of the Texaco station that she said was founded by one W.O. Harrison after he returned from his service in World War II. "He also grew fruits and vegetables, and he hauled them to town in this little truck," Hutchens said.

Among the structures she has painted that Great Falls residents would recognize more easily are a house that is now for sale on Colvin Run Road, depicted when the road was part of Leesburg Pike, the late 19th-century barn that was recently moved back from the western stretch of Georgetown Pike and the Great Falls Fire Station. "They’re going to tear down the fire station, so that’s why I painted that," Hutchens said. Parked in front of the station in her painting are its original fire trucks, which she painted from a picture given to her by local historian and former volunteer firefighter Milburn Sanders. Hutchens said she had been receiving an increasing number of pictures from the area’s longtime residents.

EVEN THE OLDEST residents might not recognize other buildings that were displayed in her exhibit at the library, such as the commissary on River Bend Road where farmers once bought supplies, the Elkins Train Station that was the last stop before Georgetown Pike on the line that became Old Dominion Drive and the Springvale Post Office that was operated at the intersection of Georgetown Pike and Springvale Road from 1844 until 1917.

And the former Dingwood Post Office across Springvale Road from where the L’Auberge Chez Francois restaurant now sits, and the cabin of formerly well-known landowner Jonas Oliver next to Difficult Run are now in decay but are preserved in Hutchens’ paintings.

The paintings are all the same 8 by 10-inch size. Hutchens said uniform sizing made for easy exhibition and did away with the problem of how to frame the works, as they all could use the same frame. Also, she said, the series of uniform frames made an effective way to present history, reading like a film.

The paintings depict history, but Hutchens often uses them to support the next generation, donating high-quality reproductions for use in fund raisers for organizations like the Children’s Inn at the National Institute of Health. "I do that a lot. I love to do that," she said of donating her work. Even in Birmingham, Ala., where her subjects are not local, Hutchens said, she is able to raise money by donating old-time paintings of Northern Virginia.