This sign showing a giant green splotch on the Connecticut
River Valley, illustrates the extent of commercial tobacco growing in western
New England. From about Portland,
Connecticut, following the river up to lower Vermont, we see a huge swath of
land that more or less replicates the gouging of the glacier that once sat
here. Maybe its peeling back layers of
earth as it retreated is the reason for this area’s having some of the most
fertile growing land in New England.
Certainly left behind a lot of dinosaur footprints.
The first European settlers here were quick to notice, and
quick to exploit, the fertile land, and started growing tobacco as early as the
1650s. The native tribes hereabouts,
however, had grown tobacco for their own use long before that.
Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum
The colonists smoked it in clay pipes then, and some was
shipped back to the mother country, but it is said that Connecticut’s
Revolutionary War hero (and French and Indian War) Israel Putnam, bringing
tobacco seeds back from Cuba was the start of the growing of this special
tobacco for rolling into cigars. We visted his
monument in this previous post.
Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum
Commercial tobacco growing, mainly on small family farms,
took off in the 1800s, when cigar smoking among men became popular.
The kind grown here was called Broadleaf, the
outer wrapper of the cigar.
Competition
from Sumatra later in the century inspired growers hereabouts to turn over a
new leaf, so to speak, in tobacco growing.
In the early 1900s they came up with the idea of erecting enormous light
cloth tents over the tobacco fields, which by cutting direct sunlight and
increasing the humidity of the atmosphere underneath the tenting, replicated
the growing conditions in Sumatra.
This
is called Shade tobacco, and it is considered the finest cigar wrapper.
The tobacco farms, not just small family farms anymore but
also large commercial plantations (part of Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee,
Massachusetts was once the site of the American Sumatra company plantation),
was a huge influence on the economy of the Connecticut River Valley, and
provided thousands of jobs.
Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum
Local folks, including many teens, found work here, but
tobacco growing is such a labor-intensive project, with a lot of work done by
hand, that workers were sought from other parts of the country to work here
seasonally. One of the first drives to
bring in outside workers occurred during World War II, when of course a lot of
local men were called into the service.
During these years, many young people arrived from the South. One of
them a young Martin Luther King, Jr.
Religious services, Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum
He arrived here in 1944, when he was just 15 years old. He obtained a job on a tobacco farm in
Simsbury, Connecticut that summer to earn money for college. In The
Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (ed. Clayborne Carson, IPM, Time
Warner, 1998), Dr. King recounts that he was surprised that he could attend a “white”
church, and eat in any restaurant he wanted, because there were no segregation laws
in the north. “I had never thought that
a person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate in one of the finest
restaurants in Hartford.”
He wrote home to his parents in June, 1944:
I am very sorry I am so long about writing but I have been
working most of the time. We are really
having a fine time here and the work is very easy. We have to get up every day at 6:00. We have very good food. And I am working kitchen so you see I get
better food.
We have service here every Sunday about 8:00 and I am the
religious leader we have a Boys choir here and we are going to sing on the air
soon. Sunday I went to church in
Simsbury it was a white church…On our way here we saw some things I had never
anticipated to see. After we passed Washington
there was no discrimination at all the white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any
where we want to.
Tell everybody I said hello and I am still thinking of the
church and reading my bible. And I am
not doing any thing I would not do in front of you…
Your Son...
The adult Dr. King continues in his autobiography, “After
that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation…I
could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places,
separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly
because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and
self-respect.”
Obviously, not all learning experiences on the tobacco farms
were quite as profound as this young man’s, and later decades came to know
labor unrest, with conditions that were not always satisfactory in the larger
work camps. Waves of other newcomers
came to the Valley as temporary tobacco workers and stayed to make a home here,
from Jamaica, from Puerto Rico, as well as from Central America, Haiti, Mexico,
and Africa.
Choir, workers from Jamaica, Photo Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum
The height of tobacco growing occurred in early 1920s when
some 30,800 acres in Connecticut alone were devoted to this crop. Today, there are only about 2,000 acres left.
This is due to a number of factors, in part to the value of
real estate turning land over to industrial parks and shopping plazas, to the
fact that cigarette smoking eclipsed the popularity of cigar smoking, and that
younger generations have come to understand that smoking will kill you.
Exhibit Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum, photo JT Lynch
Two excellent sources of information on the history of
tobacco growing in the Connecticut River Valley, used for this article, are the
Connecticut Public Television documentary “Connecticut’s Tobacco Valley”
(produced and directed by Frank Borres,
2001), and the Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum.
Photo JT Lynch
This museum is comprised of a tobacco shed with machinery,
implements, and tobacco, and a separate archives building containing many
artifacts, exhibits, photos and books on this interesting aspect of western New
England history.
It’s located in
Windsor, Connecticut.
Have a look here at the website.
Another viewpoint of the story of tobacco farms in
Connecticut will be discussed this Thursday on my
Another Old Movie Blog when we
take a look at “Parrish” (1961), which starred Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens,
Claudette Colbert, and Karl Malden.
It’s
a lavish, Hollywood version of tobacco growing, but a lot of it was filmed
right here in Windsor, Connecticut.
I
hope you can join us.
