The Burchfield Homestead Musuem, located in Salem, was recently added to the digital Ohio Literary Trail.
According to Sara Baer, President of the Burchfield Homestead Society, “Charles E Burchfield was a noted artist and lifelong journal keeper. His watercolor is still sough after and his published journals give insight into his daily thoughts and inspirations.”
Although the museum and gardens celebrate the artist, his journal writing is the reason for the addition to the Ohio Literary Trail. In fact, according to Ohioana Library Assocation Executive Director David Weaver, whose organization oversees the Trail and its expansion, Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, edited by Benjamin T. Townsend, won a 1993 Ohioana Book Award. The journals, spanning the time frame from the summer of Burchfield’s junior year in high school to 9 months before his death in 1967 at the age of 73, provide a captivating and personal look inside the mind of one of the country’s most celebrated watercolorists.
The Burchfield Homestead Museum is located at 867 East Fourth Street in Salem, and provides the opportunity to learn about the artist and to connect with the many paintings he created in this space as well as his memories of it. The Homestead’s print collection is arranged for visitors to compare Burchfield’s unique renderings of the views out the windows to the existing neighborhood, where most of the houses are unchanged since the early 1900s. Visitors get to see for themselves how an artist of great vision and talent transformed the ordinary into extraordinary works of art. Quotes from his journals are further connections to his thought process. Burchfield produced fantastic landscapes in which he attempted to show emotions and even the senses of sound and smell.
Burchfield and art historians consider his Golden Year of productivity to be 1917 in Salem. In 1956 Time magazine called him “the greatest living U.S. Watercolorist.” Life, Fortune and other mass circulation magazines carried feature articles about him.
Recently, the Burchfield Homestead Museum underwent a facelift thanks to an Ohio History Fund Grant from the Ohio History Connection. The project resulted in new paint and fresh window caulking to help preserve the house, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The “Burchfield Homestead Exterior Painting Project” is funded in part by the Ohio History Fund, a grant program of the Ohio History Connection. Your donations to the Ohio History Fund make this program possible. www.ohiohistory.org/historyfund
There is no better time to visit the Burchfield Homestead, which is open from 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays from May through October, and by appointment. Please call 330-717-0092 at least three days in advance to schedule visits. Check the website for special holiday hours for the Trees and Trains event in November through December and the schedule of other special events.