The small gold rush town of Johnsville was quiet on the afternoon in 1973 when I painted this window of an abandoned boarding house, a leftover from the 1849 Gold Rush. Warped boards covered some of the windows.
Our children went inside and came out very quickly when the they discovered bats flying about up on the second floor. The only other sign of life that warm afternoon was the click-click noise of the grasshoppers that flitted in the tall grass. The lonely cemetery at the end of Main Street had forlorn aged wood and stone grave markers bearing the exotic names of people born all over the world who had come to this area to seek their fortune, not their death.
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