Chasing a painterâs long-lost rainbow at Brook Farm
By Murray Whyte Globe Staff,Updated January 28, 2021, 11:41 a.m.
Email to a Friend
Josiah Wolcott s Brook Farm With Rainbow, painted in 1845.Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society
WEST ROXBURY â Thereâs no farm to be found at Brook Farm, a tangle of footpaths and untended forest, marsh, and brush tucked into a corner of West Roxbury. Its shambling 179 acres are surrounded, quite literally, by a sea of headstones from a pair of cemeteries that bookend it north to south. Its trails are favorites of dog walkers, I learned on a recent chilly morning. (I counted at least a dozen over an hourlong ramble.) But the land itself tells no tales. All youâll see is one lonely, peaked-roof building just off Baker Street, right across from the cemetery administrative office. It was built by a Lutheran group years after the nominal farm disbanded, a faint echo of the rich history long since returned to the eart