This is from a series of posts by MABA resident artist Barry Van Dusen

Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary, Princeton on June 5, 2015
As I’m working on this small landscape painting of the Crocker house and horse barn at Wachusett Meadow, my mind drifts back in time to when this was a working farm.

The Crocker Farm, watercolor on Winsor & Newton cold-press, 7.5″ x 11″

I notice that most of the structures I can see from this viewpoint date back to the 1830s or earlier. The new day camp building is hidden by the copse of trees, so the new picnic pavilion is the only modern structure visible from where I’m sitting (the new solar panels are further to the right and out of my view). My apologies to the hard-working Wachusett Meadow staff – I decide to leave out the pavilion and include only the old farm buildings. So, this scene is part fact and part imagination – harking back to an earlier time before a wildlife sanctuary existed here…