Linton Park, Pennsylvania Folk Artist

Linton Park, Flax Scutching Bee (1885, oil on canvas, 31 x 50 in.).
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington (Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch)

Linton Park (1826-1906) is recognized today as a significant artist in the primitive or folk tradition; however, his work was unknown during his lifetime. At his death, in fact, he had less than $100 to his name. He never married or had children, and his relatives and neighbors considered him an eccentric hermit. Evidence indicates that he was a self-taught painter, only beginning in the last few decades of his life. He mixed his own paints and created his art on materials he had on hand, such as bed ticking.

As a young man, Park began working in his father’s gristmill in Indiana County. His detailed paintings related to the lumber industry reflect his intimate knowledge of logging practices, so it is believed he worked in that trade for some period of time. By 1863 he had moved to Washington, D.C., and got a job painting the Capitol Building. While there, he enlisted in the Army during the Civil War, receiving an honorable discharge when the conflict was over.

Park soon returned home to Pennsylvania and became an inventor. He devised several household items, notably a form of venetian blinds for which he obtained a patent and that won first prize in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He also fabricated house decorations, which are believed to have been wooden moldings and frames.

By the 1880s Park had begun painting. Many of his belongings were lost when his workshop was destroyed by fire two years before his death; however, 13 of his paintings are known to survive. In addition to his notable series of logging paintings, probably his most well-known work is Flax Scutching Bee (1885). As in the logging series, Park imbued this work with great detail, revealing unknown aspects of a lost frontier tradition.

Linton Park, The Exhumation (circa 1890, oil on canvas, 24 x 33 in.).
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington (Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch)

One of Park’s paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Art had been entitled The Burial, but its name was changed because of recent research. The setting of the work, created around 1890, is a bucolic landscape with figures in mourning. A horse-drawn hearse stands behind them. It is easy to understand why the original title was assigned. In 2011 an art historian noted that it was common for families to reclaim buried soldiers and reinter them in national cemeteries created by the federal government after the Civil War. Also taking into account the clothing of the mourners, the broken gravestone, and other details, it was concluded that the scene actually depicted a family recovering a body. The National Gallery revised the title of the painting to The Exhumation.

The Pennsylvania Historical Marker nomination for Linton Park was submitted in response to Indiana County sixth grade social science student proposals. The children felt that their community should be aware of and celebrate the life and work of this unique man. The marker was approved in 2008 and dedicated on September 27 of that year in Park’s hometown of Marion Center.

Karen Galle served on the staff of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office and was the coordinator of the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program from 2005 to 2021. She retired in April.