In 1914, he returned to the church to paint a mural titled Christ's Ascension [12] near the altar,[13] depicting martyrs, saints and angels below a golden cross.

[4] Zeigler worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and painted two murals c.1936 at the Stony Point Battlefield museum in Stony Point, New York, one of which features George Washington and Anthony Wayne planning their attack from nearby Buckberg Mountain.

[14][15][16] During his time as a WPA muralist, Zeigler was commissioned to produce small murals at Newburgh Free Academy in 1936, which had opened for students in 1928.

[citation needed] Though he was in disagreement[17] with the Board of Education and Ralph Adams Cram over what the subject material should be, he ultimately decided that they should depict the drama and music,[18][failed verification] emulated by Renaissance figures.

For the second floor reading room, he proposed a set of murals depicting scenes from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

[20] When the library trustees saw Zeigler's tentative watercolor sketches of the murals, they allowed him to begin, granting him money for materials.

[21] The Faerie Queene murals were motivated by Zeigler's life-long interest in the medieval and Renaissance periods, including their art and literature.