Charles E. Burchfield

On a drive to Wyoming County, Burchfield found this farmer’s house and wanted to capture both its character and “sunlight streaming out of the watery southern horizon over the bare fields.” It is different from a Native American Longhouse, such as the one at Ganondagan in Victor, New York, built by the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk). On land in what is now the northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada, families traditionally built and lived in these long structures with walls made of natural resources from the woods and doors at each end made of animal hides. Haudenosaunee means “People of the Longhouses.”