Self-taught artist Martha Knudsen died almost four years ago, but her intricate black-and-white sketches of barns, churches, courthouses and windmills live on through the efforts of her daughter, Martie Ten-Eyck, who lives on a farm east of Newton, Kansas, and still goes to arts and craft shows to distribute her mother’s work.
“I want it to be seen and appreciated by as many people as possible,” she said.
One of the events she typically attends is the annual show held in late September at the JM Collingsworth barn near Pretty Prairie, Kansas.
Last year, after setting up a booth, she learned about the role her mother played in its painstaking restoration during a conversation with the owner, Brenda Pace.
“She told me that seeing my mother’s image gave her the incentive and the vision of what her barn could be,” TenEyck recalled. “That was her motivation to fix it up. It really got to me, knowing that’s what did it.”
It was exactly the outcome her mother would have wanted.
Knudsen was devoted to old barns, and drawing them was her way of preserving them. She also wrote brief historical accounts to accompany many of the drawings.
Her husband Ivan still lives on their Newton area farm, which has a beautiful old barn of its own.
“It was featured in my mom’s first book,” Ten-Eyck explained. “It’s a big cattle and hay barn built in 1906.”
Knudsen made and sold wall calendars for 20 years, and later books, postcards, refrigerator magnets and other printed items, which she often sold at craft shows.
Growing up on a farm near Moundridge shaped her rural aesthetic. She started sketching in college, mostly horses, before going to work as a dental hygienist and raising two daughters.
She and her husband moved from Wichita to Newton in 1966. There, Knutsen became active in the Kansas Barn Alliance and helped establish the Carriage Factory Art Gallery, where she served on the board of directors.
In her later years, she continued looking for new barns to sketch. Her four published books included at least one barn from every county in Kansas.
TenEyck helped her mother by taking snapshots of interesting barns she saw as she drove through the countryside in her previous job as an IRS auditor.
After her mother’s passing in 2020, when the time came to help her dad clean out their house, she discovered a rich treasure trove of prints. She was determined to distribute her mother’s remaining inventory far and wide.
“I wasn’t going to throw any of it away. I still want to find good homes for it and let other people enjoy it,” she said.
Since then, she’s donated items to many historical societies and preservation groups, including the Thomas Farm in Colby, home to the state’s largest barn, Old Cowtown in Wichita and the Lincoln County Historical Society.
TenEyck said she plans to attend a few more craft shows until the inventory runs out. It is both a labor of love and a tribute. Everything is priced at $5 a piece.
Clearly, the world has changed since her mother retired and took up drawing fulltime. Social media has made it easier for barn enthusiasts to connect and share photos, her daughter noted.
“My mom would have loved the Kansas Barn page on Facebook. She would have found so many new barns that way,” she reflected. “There’s still so many different barns out there she never had a chance to see.”
