We drove up Grout Road while we were on our “find old barns” tour of Weathersfield a few weeks ago. Neither of us remembered ever going up there before. It’s a typical dead end dirt road in our little town, but we thought we’d check it out. Way up at the top of a long hill there’s this wonderful barn, carefully propped up and seemingly abandoned. “What’s your story?” I asked it.

I snapped a few photos, then when I got home I started researching. It had once been on a stagecoach route when the road went through to Tarbell Hill Rd. to Cavendish. I dug around and found an image of a coach ticket which was printed in Windsor, VT in 1848 and an advertisement for stage service right in that area. Those two items became part of the background sky in my new piece, along with the text from a story about a stagecoach ride which appeared in the Vermont Journal on February 1, 1848. (Click on any of these to see the actual specimens). I found a wonderful old black and white photo of a large group of folks crammed into and onto a coach in Granville, Vermont. They became my ghostly characters on a journey. As I added color and detail to this photograph, the people came to life to me. It’s so interesting when you look so closely to work on an image, they start telling you their stories. I feel like I know them all just a little bit now. Who could they be? Where were they going? How long did it take?

I am having an enormous amount of fun with these! The next one is itching to be started. Stay tuned. A group of the paintings will be displayed and for sale at the Inn at Weathersfield soon. In the meantime, prints are available at https://canvasworksdesigns.com/project/old-vermont-barn-3-grout-road/