Weir Farm, in the Connecticut towns of Ridgefield and Wilton, is the only unit of the National Park System devoted to American painting. The painter Julian Alden Weir made his turn toward American Impressionism here, and the land he painted — hills, meadows, bare ledges of old rock and boulders left by glaciers — is the product of a long geologic history.
| Where | Ridgefield and Wilton, Fairfield County, southern Connecticut |
| Authorized | October 31, 1990 |
| Size | about 74 acres (30 hectares) |
| Protects | Weir's home, studio and farm; 15 historic structures; gardens, orchards, terraces, fields and stone walls; about 3 miles (5 km) of trails; hundreds of spots where paintings were made |
| Collection | more than 200,000 archival items and objects — paintings, prints, sculpture, decorative arts and furniture of the Weir, Young and Andrews families |
Three generations of artists
The farm was home to three generations of American artists: Julian Alden Weir, painter; his daughter Dorothy Weir Young, painter, and her husband Mahonri M. Young, sculptor; and then Sperry and Doris Andrews, both painters. The artists shaped the place deliberately to capture the light and colour Impressionism was about. Around the historic core lie old fields going back to forest, moist hardwood woods, vernal pools, streams, a pond and exposed ridges of bedrock.
The rock beneath the paintings
The park lies in Connecticut's Western Uplands, where bands of rock run north to south, the grain of hundreds of millions of years of Appalachian mountain-building.
| Age | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Ordovician | metamorphic and meta-igneous bedrock — mostly unnamed granitic gneiss | throughout the park |
| Ordovician | Harrison Gneiss | the eastern part of the park |
| Pleistocene | glacial till and erratics (boulders carried in by ice) | a thin cover over the bedrock |
In the ice ages, glaciers scraped and reworked New England's landscape and left behind loose till and stray boulders — the rocks, hills and shallow valleys that turn up in Weir's paintings. The park belongs to the New England physiographic province and shares its history with the region around it.
Maps and reports
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory has published a geologic map and report for Weir Farm, free on the NPS DataStore.
Sources
Written from "NPS Geodiversity Atlas — Weir Farm National Historic Site, Connecticut," National Park Service Geologic Resources Division, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which cites Thornberry-Ehrlich (2012), London (1984) and the National Park Service (2017).
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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