Payne Hollow as it it today
The house and studio at Payne Hollow is deteriorating and needs help to bring back the wonder and awe of its glory days. We have started that and shall continue in full force now that we have acquired the property and are raising funds for restoration. Created from a compilation of recent photographs made by Joe Wolek and John Nation with vintage images by various friends over the years. The paintings are from the Collection of Bill and Flo Caddell. Music by Will Oldham from his piece, “Seafarers Music.”
Vintage Payne Hollow as it was with Harlan and Anna Hubbard
This is the story of building their handcrafted rustic house and the life they enjoyed on the site for over 35 years. It is derived from Morgan Atkinson’s documentary, “Wonder, the lives of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.” Vintage footage of the Hubbards and Payne Hollow were made by John Morgan of KCET in the 1970s and 80s. Music by Will Oldham from his piece, “Seafarers Music.”
Harlan Hubbard was born in 1900 in Bellevue, Kentucky, just across from Cincinnati. His father died when he was young, leaving Hubbard and his two brothers, Lucien and Frank, to support their mother. Between 1912-1918 Harlan and his mother lived in New York City to be closer to Frank and Lucien. Harlan attended the National Academy of Design, with the intention to become an artist. Harlan and his mother returned to Kentucky in 1919, where Harlan briefly continued his art education at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Afterwards, he worked construction, using the skills he learned on the job to build a home for Rose and himself, and an art studio in Fort Thomas, Kentucky in 1923. The studio is now on the National Register of Historic Buildings.
Harlan began regularly journaling and sketching in his free time, roaming the countryside and the riverbanks. It is a practice he maintained until his death. He continued to act as an amateur naturalist and anthropologist of local culture and nature. He met his future wife, Anna Eikenhout, at the Public Library in Cincinnati. Harlan and Anna married in 1943. Anna encouraged him to fulfill a lifelong dream of building a shantyboat and drifting down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
Harlan and Anna built the shantyboat together in 1944, and began a nine-year adventure on their floating home, traveling from Brent, Kentucky to the Louisiana bayou until 1951. The Hubbards returned to Kentucky and settled in Trimble County at Payne Hollow, which is accessible only on foot or by boat. They constructed their home, and later an art studio and goat barn. They maintained a large organic garden and grew fish, or foraged for most of their food.
Harlan Hubbard published two renowned books about his life, Shantyboat (New York, 1953), and Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society (New York, 1974). A number of his journals and other writings have been published posthumously Although he remains best-known as an author and proto-environmentalist, Harlan considered himself an artist, first. He worked in oil painting, watercolor, and woodcutting, and left behind a number of sketchbooks. His work can be favorably compared to other Modernist painters of place, like John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Burchfield.
“In the distant future someone may relate—if anyone will listen to him—how his grandfather, as a small boy, used to go down to Payne Hollow when it was still a wilderness. There on the riverbank, in a house which they had made out of rocks and trees, lived a couple all by themselves. They planted a garden, kept goats, ate weeds and groundhogs and fish from the river, which in those days was full of fish. They never had to go to a store. The man worked with axe and hoe, without machines. He painted pictures of the old steamboats and made drawings of the life they lived.”