Buxton
Buxton
Jennifer Drinkwater. Buxton, acrylic on wood, 12” x 12”, 2023.
**Please note that while Buxton is available for purchase, it is currently in an exhibition and will not be available for delivery until late April. Please email jennifer@whatsgoodproject.com with any questions.
Buxton arrives wired and ready to hang. My genius husband Aaron Swanson carefully crafts each panel with high-quality wood, mounting a smooth plywood surface onto a sturdy, mitred wooden frame that provides depth and support to the painting. The sides of the panel are sanded and finished for smoothness.
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Twenty percent of profits support Oskaloosa Main Street.
The community story that inspired Buxton….
In 2022, my husband and I visited the Nelson Pioneer Farm in Oskaloosa, Iowa, to check out Celebrating Buxton, a fundraiser to preserve the history of Buxton, a former coal-mining town in Mahaska county.
The afternoon included, among other things, a family-style soul food lunch, gospel choir performance, puppet show, history tour, and old-fashioned baseball game. It was genius.
Why celebrate Buxton? Because it was a predominantly African American community from 1880 to 1920, with nearly 2700 Black Americans and 1990 white Americans and Europeans living there in 1905.
Currently an Iowa ghost town, the Buxton community included Black doctors, lawyers, and business owners (and no police or city council), as well as an integrated YMCA, community pool, and the Buxton Wonders, a winning Iowa baseball team.
The demise of this community, as with many others in southern Iowa, was due to a combination of factors, mainly companies exhausting the local coal supply and a decreased demand for coal.