Challenge Day 6: Homestead

"Homestead"

Oil on Linen Panel "6x8"

Available Here

For day six of the challenge I chose to do a landscape depicting a piece of the history of the Sacramento Mountains. The house depicted in the painting was built sometime in the early 1900s.  My husband's family homesteaded in the Sacramento Mountains near the village of Cloudcroft in 1887.  The Nichols family moved to their present location in the early 1900s.  The house in the picture is still standing and is located between our cherry and apple orchards near a patch of fig trees and a 100 year old apricot tree. My husband's parents and sisters, great uncle, and other relatives called this structure home at various times. In last 40 years the house served as boarding for the migrant workers that harvested the fruit from our orchards. Many structures such as this house can be found throughout the Sacramento Mountains but regrettably they are slowly deteriorating and those that remember their history are leaving us. I take joy in capturing these structures in paint so that they live on and their story can be told on mediums such as this blog.