The artist relaxes in her home. (Photo by Richard Wolfson)

It all started with butter and eggs. In the early 1900s, a man named Charles Clark came to Harvard by train to sell butter and eggs to the Gale and Dickson general store in the town center. And because he did, a little girl named Janet Streeter grew up loving her summer vacations on Sheep Island in Bare Hill Pond. And because she did, the town has had a resident artist for nearly 35 years who has captured its beauty and history in hundreds of paintings, drawings, and illustrations, and in one very tall, lovely mural in the Shaker Place building on Ayer Road.

Janet Streeter Fowke wasn’t born in Harvard, but she seems to know every inch of it and has drawn it from every angle in every season of the year. She was a mainstay at the Harvard Post almost from the paper’s beginning in 1973, has illustrated a couple of books with Harvard themes, and has published a collection of her drawings, “Hill Country,” which came out in 1985 and was sold at the General Store, where this remarkable story began.

The egg salesman, Charles Clark, was Janet’s grandfather, and he took the advice of friends he met at Gale and Dickson’s store and brought his family to Bare Hill Pond for a summer vacation. They traveled from Medford by train and stagecoach, and then by boat to a small cottage on Sheep Island owned by Fiske Warren, a wealthy landowner “who owned everything around,” Janet says, especially around the pond. There were five cottages on Sheep Island, and the same families came back year after year, eventually buying the cottages when they went on the market. The Edmands family owned two cottages, and another belonged to the Dicksons. Janet can’t remember who owned the fifth cottage, but the rest are still in the hands of descendants, and the place operates as one big family compound, where everybody has known everybody else for as long as they can remember. Over the years, the families have been formally joined, too: Janet’s Aunt Esther married Stub Dickson, so Janet shares ownership of her grandfather’s cottage with her cousin Herbert Dickson.

"Sheeo Island Rock" (Illustration by Janet Fowke)

Janet and her brother Clark came to Sheep Island every summer as children to spend time with their grandparents, forming a bond with the town that would have far-reaching effects. When Clark, who is ten years older than Janet, graduated from medical school after World War II, he became the town doctor, taking over from Harvard’s legendary Doc Royall, who was ready to retire. Clark had attended medical school on a state scholarship that required him to practice for two years in a town with fewer than 3,000 residents. Harvard fit the bill, so he set up his practice in the house right behind the library. He stayed there for a number of years until he got tuberculosis from a patient and was no longer able to stand the rigors of a family practice. Dr. Streeter continued to practice medicine, however, and is now retired and living in Hingham.

Meanwhile, Janet was growing up in Wakefield, then Medford, where she started drawing at an early age. She recalls her fifth-grade teacher at Medford’s Hillside School assigning her to draw a mural depicting the history of water transportation, on unbleached cotton, which wrapped around the whole classroom. “It kept me busy for awhile,” she says with characteristic understatement. In her early teens she earned money drawing the buildings at Tufts for note paper that was sold in the college store. Janet’s parents always encouraged her art endeavors, but she had no particular training as a child. “We lived across the street from a couple of artists,” she says, and they helped her a little. Her father loved to draw as well, but he “never had the opportunity to develop it.”

After high school, Janet applied to the Massachusetts School of Art in Boston and was accepted at a time when the school was booming. World War II had just ended and veterans were coming back, eager to use the educational benefits they had earned. The school normally accepted 100 students a year, but the year she applied they took 150, three-quarters of them young veterans. Janet earned money for school by drawing posters and other artwork for the Tufts Arena Theater, and remembers her summer jobs there with obvious relish. “We took water pistols to work and when it got too hot, we’d have battles,” she says. It’s pretty clear that she held her own with her overwhelmingly male cohorts.

Janet got a job restoring old photographs after college and lived at home in Medford. Her parents were friends of the Fowkes, a Somerville family who attended their church, and who had a son serving in the Army in Korea. At his parents’ request, Janet began writing to Don Fowke, sending him drawings, and even installments of a book she was writing called “Nathaniel and the Great Grey Owl.” Asked if Don liked the book, Janet chuckles, “Of course he liked it; he’d like anything that came in the mail.” When Don came home, he asked her to marry him, Janet says, and she replied, “You’re kidding.” They hardly knew each other, and it would be awhile before she accepted his proposal.

Don got his degree from Boston University, then a teaching job in Duxbury, and eventually they were married. She was 26 and he was a year older. They lived in Duxbury, then in Pembroke, and finally moved to Harvard in 1972, when their older son Guy was in elementary school and younger son Jay was not quite in school. Don was a school guidance counselor in Marlborough then, and when they were looking for a place to live, they were drawn to Harvard for the same reason that Clark had been: Sheep Island was here.

And so they came to town in 1973, renting the first floor of the big house at the corner of Fairbank Street and Littleton Road. The Harvard Post was brand new then, and Janet called publisher Ed Miller and asked if they needed an artist. “We can’t pay much,” Ed said, and Janet replied that all she wanted was enough to pay for her son Guy’s music lessons. Guy was taking piano lessons from Nancy Brown, who lived nearby on Old Littleton Road and taught legions of Harvard youngsters over the years. As these things go in small towns, it turned out that Janet’s brother Clark had delivered Nancy Brown’s children.

Janet’s tenure at the Post spanned a third of a century, and produced hundreds of editorial cartoons, a number of striking full-front-page drawings for the annual year-end issue, and always just the right graphic when there was unsightly white space to fill. In her spare time, she produced “Hill Country,” illustrated editions of Louisa May Alcott’s “Transcendental Wild Oats” and the “Harvard Shaker Book of Days,” created a Shaker coloring book, and sketched “literally hundreds” of houses for Harvard realtor Peter Warren, who made a practice of giving each of his clients one of her fine pen-and-ink drawings of their new house. And she did the big mural at Shaker Place, standing on a scaffold to create a soaring view of Shaker Village that is truly remarkable.

Nowadays, she’s doing some drawing for the new Harvard Press, and still sketches for her own pleasure as well. Since Don’s death several years ago, she doesn’t spend as much time on Sheep Island as they used to. But sitting in her snug house on Ayer Road on a frigid February day, she looks forward to summer, when Jay will come north from his home in Tennessee and bring his wife Michelle and their daughters Rachel and Rebecca to the island. Guy and his wife Sandy will come, too, from Townsend, with their children Kerryann and Jason. They will bring all the food they need by boat, and bottled water, and propane for the stove. There is no electricity on the island, only propane- and battery-powered lights. There is nothing for the children to do but swim, and fish, and play golf on the silly little “golf course” the families built in the center of the island. At night they watch the sun go down and play board games. But the kids are never bored, Janet says: “They love it,” just as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have loved it. Harvard has changed immeasurably since Charles Clark first came to town, but Sheep Island has stayed much the same as it was when little Janet Streeter first saw it.