Detail of the 1878 poster after restoration (Laura Schell)

Buffalo Bill's eye was missing. His horse was in pieces. Now the cowboy is back. A restored billboard for the traveling entertainer's show was unveiled in June, five years to the day that a facade collapse revealed the poster, one of the oldest in the country.

For more than 120 years, a 26-by-10-foot billboard had been hidden in a brick building in Jamestown, N.Y., until 2002, when a demolition crew noticed it.

"There were some pieces that just crumbled like potato chips," says Pat Anzideo, project manager. "They were so fragile you didn’t want to breathe on them." The building's owner, the Reg Lenna Civic Center, hired a conservator to save the poster.

"It's been like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle," says Laura Schell, the conservator who removed and restored the billboard, which is now on display on the site of the same theater that the poster advertises.

After Schell removed and stabilized the poster fragments, they sat in storage until the group raised the money for the $109,382 restoration. In 2004, Save America's Treasures awarded a matching grant of $52,000 to the project. Cody's ancestors sponsored the initial work.

William "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917) worked as a gold prospector, Pony Express rider, Civil War soldier for the Union, and buffalo hunter—he gave the meat to railroad workers. But he became a star after author Ned Buntline penned a dime-novel series about his adventures and convinced Cody to go on tour with his play in the 1870s.

The Jamestown billboard advertises one of Cody's earliest shows, a May 1878 performance at the Allen Opera House. Today the poster is on display in a movie house built on the opera house site in the 1920s and restored in the 1990s.

"People just stand in awe," Anzideo says. "It was ephemera; it was supposed to blow away in two weeks. It was just an accident that caused it to be preserved and another accident that caused it to be discovered."

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