Over the past 143 years, the Huddleston Farm House was a family home, an inn, a place for travelers to buy provisions, or have meals and is now an Indiana State Historical Landmarks site museum, and is located near Cambridge City, on US 40, known as “the National Road.”
My first memory of visiting this building from 1841 was many years ago when my wife worked here as an exhibits designer and assistant to the historian. I used to walk the grounds with our children and admire the buildings and 78 acre country setting in the different seasons, and come to attend events, but hadn’t gotten around to actually painting here until a year ago, and again this September.
For the past two years, the Richmond Art Museum has kindly invited me as part of a regional group of plein air artists to participate in a paint-out on location, and then has hosted us as their dinner guests at the Huddleston House’s annual harvest supper fund raiser. It is a delightful occasion with a supper menu that is historically correct to the 1840’s when the building was an inn for travelers of the National Road. If you can, I highly recommend that you put it on your calendar to attend this annual event.
For my painting here I selected a view of the rear of the farmhouse where you can see the entry for the spring kitchen, the woodshed and back porch. As I stood facing the building and working, I enjoyed the comradery of the other artists located on the grounds to my immediate left and right and elsewhere. All of us were looking in different directions and finding inspiration in views of adjacent buildings, the crop fields of soy bean, a nearby forested area, plus other views of the grounds, out buildings, or the farmhouse. This year it was a beautiful, warm, sunny afternoon during the third Thursday of September, when the museum’s guests strolled the property and watched us at work, or visited with us as we painted.