10/24/2026
Thanks That Ohio Feeling🎨🖌️🖼️
Look up Charles Burchfield and nearly every biography will file him under Buffalo, New York.
That's true, as far as it goes. He did live near Buffalo for most of his grown-up life. But the paintings that made his name, and the way of seeing that carried him for fifty years, came out of a tan wooden house on East Fourth Street in Salem.
This one.
Charles was born in 1893 in Ashtabula Harbor, up on the lake. In September 1898 his father died, and his mother moved the family to Salem. He would stay in this house until he was 28.
He was a smart kid. Valedictorian of his high school class. He took a job at the Mullins Company, a Salem manufacturer, and ended up in the cost department. So by day he added up what auto parts cost. The rest of the time, he noticed things.
He went off to the Cleveland School of Art and graduated in 1916. That fall he won a scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York. He lasted one day in the life drawing class and left.
One day. I have stayed longer at a birthday party I didn't want to be at.
So Charles came home to Salem and went back to his job at Mullins. And he painted on his lunch breaks and in every free hour he could find.
Then came 1917.
Burchfield later called it his "golden year." In that single year he made about 400 works of art. Four hundred. While holding down his job at Mullins. While living in the family house.
I need a minute with that number. Some weeks I can't get one load of laundry from the dryer to a drawer, and this man made a work of art a day, more or less, with a timecard waiting for him in the morning.
What did he paint? Salem. His own house and garden. The woods and pastures outside town. His early pictures use bold, bright colors and flat, strong patterns, and some of them look like the trees and houses are breathing. Plain old Salem turned into something almost magical, and it was all right there outside his window.
He kept journals, too. One line that gets quoted a lot has him coming home "under the half-moon exceeding light of heart, so that I unconsciously whistled." Anyone who has ever walked home happy on a warm night knows exactly that feeling.
In November 1921 he took a job designing wallpaper for a company in Buffalo and moved away. In 1930 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed his early watercolors, the ones from 1916 to 1918, and that put him on the national map.
So the pictures that made him famous were the Salem pictures.
And Salem never let go of him. From the 1920s until he died in 1967, his memories of this town kept turning up in his work. Some people keep a scrapbook. He kept a whole hometown in his head.
This photo shows the house today. Tan clapboard siding with crisp white trim, a covered front porch held up by white columns, and out front a small wooden sign that reads Burchfield Homestead Museum, with yellow flowers painted on it.
The house got its second life thanks to Salem folks who refused to let it go. Dick Wootten, the museum's original curator, was one of the people who helped save it, and the Burchfield Homestead Society looks after it today. If you'd like to visit, check with the society ahead of time for when it's open.
He is still filed under Buffalo. That's fine. Salem knows where the golden year happened.
