Their Dream House

Oil on Canvas
24″ x 18″
$1000
Contact to Purchase

Martin Ranch
Joel Charles Martin and Diana Marsh Martin, with their five children, left Milwaukee, Wisconsin by train to start a new life on their homestead forty miles northwest of Miles City. Joel had lost all the fingers on his left hand in a sawmill accident and felt farming was the way he could now support his family. They shipped everything they owned: a steam engine, machinery, lumber, household items, horses, and livestock. At first they survived in a tent, then a tar paper shack for the summer, until he built this magnificent two-story structure. Later came a two-story granary with a dance hall at the top. The barn was built on a hillside with the lower half dug into the bank. Martin intended to build a cheese factory and made the cement vats with gravel from the creek. He nearly had the building completed when a wind storm smashed it into a hayfield, and no one knows if it was ever rebuilt. They raised oats, wheat and alfalfa, and heated the home with coal dug from the beds to the west. Martin used the threshing machine in the painting for his grain and also his neighbors’. In the yard was a six-foot stack of buffalo skulls, which disappeared as visitors from the east arrived. The drought of the Great Depression ended the Martins’ lives in that house, for all they could grow in those dry, horrible years was Russian Thistles. Everything was sold in a farm auction in April, 1939.