#377 Newcastle Packing Shed #377 Long Sleeve T-Shirt

Newcastle is the last town before you get to Auburn off of I-80 in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Once the Gold Rush panned out, the miners that stayed turned to agriculture as means to make a living. With a temperate climate and fertile soil, fruit orchards flourished and in the 1870’s, the Newcastle Fruit Growers Shipping and Preserving Association was created. In 1869, the historic Transcontinental Railroad opened for traffic, connecting the East and West coasts to passengers and goods. Newcastle, with its proximity to multiple agricultural areas, ice for refrigeration, and transcontinental transport, became the largest fruit packing facility in the nation. Peaches, plums, pears, and later mandarins, traveled from Placer County to markets as far away as the East Coast. The fruit industry sustained the livelihood of much of the community, from orchard owners, to fruit pickers, to working on the railroad. In 1876, 1 million pounds of fruit was shipped out of Newcastle annually.
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My search to find my biological family was the genesis of my journey into the world of art. When I finally found my birth family, at the age of 40, I was plunged into a new and very different family. On one occasion while talking with the father I had never known, I discovered that my great uncle was the renowned watercolorist Dong Kingman. Fatefully discovering a cheap watercolor paint set, and intrigued by my relationship with Kingman, I wondered if I had inherited any of his talent. This lingering question spurred me into trying to paint. My first challenge was deciding what subjects I would paint. As a fan of Van Gogh, and knowing that he painted images from his day to day life: houses, fields, people working, I decided to do the...