lable at ScienceDirect

Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168

Contents lists avai

Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhg

Mobility, farmworkers, and Connecticut’s tobacco valley, 1900–1950

Blake HarrisonAdjunct Professor, Department of Geography, Southern Connecticut State University, 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06511, United States

Abstract

By the early decades of the twentieth century, southern New England’s Connecticut Valley had become a center of shade tobacco production anda destination for seasonal farmworkers drawn from sources inside and outside of New England. This paper explores the history of three groups of seasonalworkersdchildren from area cities and towns; white southern high school students; and young African American men from southern high schools andblack collegesdwith an eye to assessing the impact of their presence on the form and meaning of the Connecticut Valley. My first goal is to add depth tothe historiography of twentieth-century New England farming by drawing attention to the largely overlooked story of non-rural and extra-regionalseasonal farmworkers. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticut tobacco labor according to the study of mobility and its relationship tolandscape. The mobility of workers into and within the region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shade tobacco economy while at the same timeposing challenges to popularized cultural conventions about regional identity. For this reason, I argue, the history of Connecticut’s shade tobaccolandscape was informed by the efforts of shade tobacco growers to direct and control a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-basedidentities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers and by attempting to control theirmobility, large-scale, corporate growers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintain control over the development and identity of the valley’srural landscape.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Mobility; Agriculture; Labor; Tobacco; Connecticut; New England

At the start of the twentieth century, the Connecticut Valley ofnorth-central Connecticut and central Massachusetts had beensettled by Euro-Americans for well over two centuries. During thattime, forests, meadows, and Native American settlements hadgiven way almost entirely to a mix of farms and villages andindustrial towns. One of the most dramatic changes in the valley,though, had taken place only recently as commercial tobaccoproduction spread across tens of thousands of acres of farmland. Bythe 1910s, tobacco had become a leading agricultural commodity inthe valley, and its expansion in acreage had made it both a highlyvisible presence in the landscape and a powerful force for shapingthe region’s identity. This was particularly true of one variety oftobaccodshade-grown tobaccodwhose extensive tent-coveredfields had in many respects come to symbolize the area’s entiretobacco landscape. As one observer wrote in 1918, ‘Anyone drivingan automobile in the summer time through the fields and hills ofthe picturesque Connecticut Valley north of Hartford is struck bythe great number of tobacco tents constantly coming into view,covering acres of land, running up the hillsides, and stretching overthe valleys. A lady who was astonished at the number and extent of

E-mail address: blakeharrison1@gmail.com1 M.C. Welles, Child Laborers in the Shade Grown Tobacco Industry of Connecticut [Hart

0305-7488/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.07.002

these tents exclaimed, ‘Don’t we grow anything but tobacco inConnecticut?’’1

This paper examines early twentieth-century seasonal tobaccofarmworkers drawn from both within and outside of New England,and the influence their presence had on land use and identity in theConnecticut Valley. My first goal is to draw attention to the story ofnon-rural and extra-regional seasonal farmworkers in twentieth-century New Englandda story largely overlooked in the regionalliterature. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticuttobacco labor according to the analytical context of mobility, and indoing so, to offer an empirical examination of the relations betweenmobility and landscape. The mobility of workers into and withinthe region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shadetobacco economy while at the same time posing challenges topopularized cultural conventions about regional identity.Throughout the paper, then, I argue that the history of land use andlabor in the valley’s shade tobacco landscape unfolded according toa larger set of efforts made by shade tobacco growers to direct andcontrol a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-based identities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility

ford], 1918, 1.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168158

among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers andby attempting to control their mobility, large-scale, corporategrowers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintaincontrol over the development and identity of the valley’s rurallandscape.

Agriculture and mobility in New England

Human mobility has been an important consideration in historicalstudies of land use, social relations, economic development, anddemographic trends in New England for decades. Near the forefrontof these concerns lies the tale of outmigration from late nineteenth-century rural New England. Perhaps its most prominent earlytelling is found in Harold Fisher Wilson’s 1936 book, The HillCountry of Northern New England. During the last three decades ofthe nineteenth century, thousands of farmersdprimarily fromupland farms in northern New Englanddgrew weary of strugglingto make ends meet on what was often marginal farmland. Conse-quently, many left their farms for new opportunities in regionalcities or on potentially more prosperous land to the west. Theirdeparture, Wilson famously argued, led to the ‘decline’ of hundredsof communities throughout the region, and it signaled a major shiftin the history of New England farming.2

Wilson’s conclusions have been challenged and refined over theyears, and his book’s problems are well-known among regionalscholars.3 Yet human mobility still has an important role to play inthe study of New England’s agricultural history and rural life. Myfirst goal for this paper, then, is to demonstrate the need to examinemore deeply the movement of seasonal farmworkers into andwithin the region’s rural areas during the twentieth century. Theseforms of mobility differ from the earlier outmigrations in manywaysdtiming, direction, duration, and rationale among themdbutthey form a significant part of the important story of people on themove in New England. Seasonal farmworkers and other mobile(often landless) workers have not been absent from the regionalliterature, particularly that pertaining to the nineteenth century.Earlier work has shown that contract laborers were often recruitedfrom area towns and villages in the nineteenth century to help onfarms during busy times of the year, and that landless ‘hired men’came and went among New England farms into the twentiethcentury. The numbers of such workers rose in the ConnecticutValley and elsewhere in New England during the nineteenthcentury as many farmers were drawn increasingly into a commer-cial system geared towards production for urban markets. Thelarger and more specialized farms that characterized this capitalistshift precipitated a growing dependence on short-term wagelaborers from nearby villages and towns.4

The case of Connecticut shade tobacco highlights changes in theeconomic and geographic scale of agricultural production asfarming in some parts of New England moved towards an indus-trialized model. Although east-coast agriculture was less influencedby an industrial logic than agriculture in other parts of the UnitedStates, by the second decade of the twentieth century, shadetobacco production was rapidly being organized according to

2 H.F. Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic Histor3 H.S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-century New Englan

(1989) 450–466. Also see B. Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colon4 W.B. Rothenberg, From Market-places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of R

Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860, Ithaca, 1990. Also see C. Merchant, Ecologic5 On industrial models in agriculture, see D. Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Indu6 On defining ‘migrant’ labor, see P. Martin, Harvest of Confusion: Migrant Workers in U

industrial patterns. These included increases in scale, efficiency,mechanization, capital investment, and numbers of unskilled,seasonal workers.5 The Connecticut Valley’s gentle topography andrich soils had already helped to make the area a comparatively earlyNew England site for commercial farming and the use of seasonal,contract laborers, and outmigration ran less vigorously from thevalley than it did from northern New England. By the turn of thetwentieth century the valley was well positioned for the develop-ment of commercial tobacco farming and the increased use ofseasonal labor that accompanied it. That said, the ConnecticutValley was not the only place in New England to experiencechanges in the scale of commercial agricultural production.Commercial growers in other parts of the region were expandingtheir operations in potatoes, berries, and apples, and recruitinggrowing numbers of seasonal workers. The experiences of thesetwentieth-century seasonal workers differed from those of many oftheir New England predecessors in a number of ways, includingtheir greater numbers on individual farms, the larger size of thefarms on which they worked, the limited scope of their skills, andtheir lack of social familiarity with their employers.

This account of seasonal farmworkers in Connecticut’s shadetobacco fields elaborates on these trends, ultimately highlightinga growing reliance of commercial growers on migratory labor fromoutside the region. I focus this study on three groups of workers:child laborers recruited from area towns, and primarily the city ofHartford, Connecticut; young African–American men fromsouthern high schools and colleges; and white southern girls ofhigh school age. Although only two of these groupsdthose fromthe southdwere from outside New England, all were part of a trendin agricultural employment that led to a high level of dependenceon migrant labor. By the middle of the twentieth century thousandsof Jamaicans worked Connecticut Valley fields each year, and inrecent decades many of their places have been taken by Mexicanlaborers. In sum, seasonal farmworkers from outside New Englandhave played a role for decades in growing and harvesting ofa number of crops, including berries, apples, potatoes, and tobacco.

Itinerant Jamaicans and Mexicans, harvesting different crops indifferent places during the season fit more neatly into commonstereotypes of the ‘migrant’ worker than the three groups I examinehere.6 In fact, urban children or southern students were rarely, ifever, referred to as ‘migrants’ during their tenure in Connecticut’sshade tobacco fields. More commonly, employers referred to themby their social or demographic status (‘student’ or ‘children’) or bytheir job (‘pickers’ or ‘stringers’). They typically occupied a differentposition in the labor spectrum of Connecticut tobacco than both the‘hoboes’ or ‘itinerant’ men who worked tobacco in the earlydecades of the century and the Jamaican workers. Yet all were ‘non-local,’ and all were united by the fact of their mobility, both into andwithin the region’s farming districts.

That fact brings us to the article’s second goaldto examine therelationship between workers’ mobility and the construction oflandscape and identity in the Connecticut Valley. My thinking herefollows broadly on the heels of scholarship by environmentalhistorians and geographers examining the influence that labor

y, 1790–1930, New York, 1936.d, New York, 1984; M.M. Bell, Did New England go downhill? Geographical Review 79ial Concord, New Haven, 2004.ural Massachusetts, 1750–1850, Chicago, 1992, 149–212; C. Clark, The Roots of Ruralal Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England, Chapel Hill, 1989, 149–231.strial Ideal in American Agriculture, New Haven, 2003..S. Agriculture, Boulder, 1988, 2–3.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168 159

experiences have had on the uses and meanings of nature or place.7

Land use and identity in the Connecticut Valley were influenceddeeply by the historical experience of tobacco labor, and morespecifically, I suggest, by the context of mobility with which it wasassociated.8 Recent work in the social sciences on the social,cultural, and political implications of mobile people, mobile ideas,mobile information, and mobile capital offers some insights here.Emerging from an interest in the scale and acceleration of globalinterconnectivity, this ‘mobility turn’ or ‘new mobilities paradigm’stresses the mutual constitution of mobility, social life, and culturalidentity.9 Human mobility, from this perspective, implies morethan the literal mechanics of movement, for when people move,their actions are always informed by the social, cultural, andgeographical contexts in which they take place. In the words ofgeographer Tim Cresswell, this makes mobility ‘a thoroughly socialfacet of life imbued with meaning and power’.10

As such comments suggest, mobility studies are guided by aninquiry into social and cultural politics, into the often contested andconflicting ways in which groups assign meaning to themselves andothers. Consequently, much of this scholarship has focused on thesociological implications of mobility, particularly as related to theconstruction of human identity. What the story of mobility amongfarmworkers in Connecticut allows for are additional questionsabout mobility’s relationship to landscapedto the social processesand politics by which groups transform, understand, and seek tocontrol the landscapes around them. As we shall see, the mobility ofseasonal workers, coupled with the reactions it inspired fromgrowers and others, shaped the form and meaning of Connecticut’srural landscape in a number of important and interrelated ways. Iframe this nexus between mobility and landscape according togrowers’ efforts to control circumstances surrounding the mobilityof their seasonal workers. I begin by offering a short history oftobacco growing in the valley and the environmental conditionswith which it was associated. Next, I examine the story of childlabor imported from area towns and cities, noting the role mobilechildren played in the success of shade tobacco as well as theirimpacts on the group and place-based identities constructed bygrowers. Finally, I explore the importation of extra-regionalworkers at mid century, focusing on growers’ efforts to control themechanics and meaning of mobility among seasonal workers.

The making of a tobacco landscape

Commercial tobacco production in New England has beenconcentrated historically in a fertile zone along the Connecticut

7 R. White, ‘‘Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?’: work and natureYork, 1996, 171–185. Also see R. White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbialabor, nature, and the Lowell ‘Mill Girls’, Environmental History 9 (2004) 275–295; T.G. AnThe nature of labor: fault lines and common ground in environmental and labor history,Agricultural Landscape in the American West, Seattle, 1999; D.C. Sackman, ‘Nature’s wor1900–1940, Environmental History 5 (2000) 27–53; D. Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Mistruggle, death, and geographies of justice: the transformation of landscape in and beyoCalifornia living, California dying: dead labor and the political economy of landscape, in2003, 233–248; G.L. Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital, Philadelphia, 2003

8 For a related example, see L. Wadewitz, Pirates of the Salish sea: labor, mobility and9 J. Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-first Century, New York, 20

38 (2006) 207–226. Also see the recent special issues: Social and Cultural Geography 8 (10 T. Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Western World, New York, 2006, 4. Also see T

floor, Cultural Geographies 13 (2006) 55–77.11 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism (note 4); J.T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The Pe

J.E. Harmon, Connecticut: A Geography, Boulder, 1986, 47–80; H. S. Russell, A Long Deep F12 E. Ramsey, The history of tobacco production in the Connecticut Valley, Smith Co

Production in Connecticut, [New Haven], 1936, 2–7; C. I. Hendrickson, An Economic StudEconomic Development of the Cigar Industry in the United States, Lancaster, Pa, 1933.

13 P.J. Anderson, Tobacco Culture in Connecticut, New Haven, 1934, 718–721, 798–800; J.Fof the New England Tobacco Fields, Philadelphia, 2002, 24; The Story of Tobacco Valley, Ha

River from Springfield, Massachusetts southward to its core inHartford County, Connecticut. Parts of this so-called ‘TobaccoValley’ were settled by Europeans as early as the 1640s, and by themid nineteenth century, the valley had become a center of diver-sified, cash-crop production for regional cites as well as anemerging center of urban-industrial development in its ownright.11 Anglo settlers planted tobacco soon after their arrival, andalthough production was initially geared towards domesticconsumption and local markets, a modest amount of tobacco wasbeing exported by 1800 to markets in Philadelphia and New York.Commercial tobacco production accelerated in the early decades ofthe nineteenth century with the rising popularity of cigars amongAmerican men. New strains of tobacco grown to meet this demanddid well in the valley’s fertile soils, and the rise of home andshop-based cigar making, coupled with improved processing andshipping, soon made Hartford County a modest center for cigarmanufacturing.12

Since that time, the history of agricultural production in theConnecticut Valley has been bound to the cigar and its threeconstitutive parts. The first of these parts is the ‘filler’, or thebunched leaves that form the core of the cigar. Next is the ‘binder’leaf, which holds the filler in its proper shape. Last is the ‘wrapper’,which is a thin, fine-veined outer leaf, and the most expensive partof the cigar, due to the precise demands made on its appearanceand flavor. Connecticut Valley farmers have grown and processedtobacco for all three parts of the cigar over the past two centuries,although leaves for binders and wrappers have been the region’sprimary commodities.

Valley farmers have traditionally grown three varieties oftobacco. The first two, ‘Broadleaf’ and ‘Havana Seed,’ are suited bestfor use as binders, and like most tobacco, are grown outside, underfull sun. In this they differ from ‘shade-grown’ tobacco, the valley’sthird and most famous type of tobacco (and the one that I focus onin this paper). Shade tobacco has been grown in the valley forroughly a century under massive, field-covering tents made ofa cheesecloth fabric. Each year fabric sheets are hand woventogether over a lattice of wire and poles set at nine feet high. Shadetents create ideal micro-climatic conditions in Connecticut for theproduction of thin, flavorful, attractive, and valuable wrapperleaves. Those conditions, coupled with the region’s excellent soilshave made Connecticut shade tobacco famous around the worlddastatus it continues to hold today.13

Regardless of its variety, tobacco is always a labor-intensivecrop, requiring careful planting, transplanting, cultivating, har-vesting, and curing. Connecticut Valley tobacco is harvested in

’, in: W. Cronon (Ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, NewRiver, New York, 1995; C. Montrie, ‘I think less of the factory than of my native dell’:

drews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, Cambridge, Ma, 2008; G. Peck,Environmental History 11 (2006) 212–238; M. Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of ankshop’: the work environment and workers’ bodies in California’s citrus industry,grant Workers and the California Landscape, Minneapolis, 1996; D. Mitchell, Work,nd California’s Imperial Valley, Landscape Research 32 (2007) 559–577; D. Mitchell,: K. Anderson, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (Eds), Handbook of CulturalGeography, London,

.environment in the transnational west, Pacific Historical Review 75 (2006) 587–627.00; M. Sheller and J. Urry, The new mobilities paradigm, Environment and Planning A2007), and New Formations 43 (2001).. Cresswell, ‘You cannot shake that shimmie here’: producing mobility on the dance

ople, the Environment, and the State, 1790–1930, New York, 2001; T.R. Lewis andurrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England, Hanover, NH, 1982.

llege Studies in History 15 (1930) 107–128; A.F. McDonald, The History of Tobaccoy of the Agriculture of the Connecticut Valley, Storrs, CT, 1931, 5–6; W.N. Baer, The

. O’Gorman, Connecticut Valley Vernacular: The Vanishing Landscape and Architecturertford, [c. 1955], 14–15.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168160

August and early September, and taken quickly to tobacco barns(or ‘sheds’ in the local vernacular) where it is hung and cured.Curing requires farmers to control temperature and humiditycarefully for six to ten weeks by using small fires for heat and byopening and closing ventilation slats in the sides of the tobaccobarns. Once cured, the leaves are packed in boxes and allowed to‘sweat’ or ferment for up to a year in warehouses before beingprocessed into cigarsdprocesses that by the late-nineteenth-century were managed primarily by specialized firms.14

The landscape of the Connecticut Valley underwent a significanttransformation as tobacco production expanded, the most visiblesign of which was the growth in acreage devoted to the crop.Although land and production totals associated with tobaccofluctuated from year to year, acreage climbed steadily prior to the1920s. On the one hand, this upwards trend played out at the scaleof the individual farm. Turn-of-the-century tobacco farmers in theConnecticut Valley increasingly devoted a greater percentage oftheir acreage to the crop, thereby displacing the mixed farmingregime that came before in favor of specialized production fora cash-based market.15 On the other hand, expanding tobaccoacreage was expressed at a larger, regional scale. Land devoted to allvarieties of tobacco in New England rose from 12 199 acres in 1879to 21745 in 1909 to 36 225 in 1919, with Connecticut accounting forroughly three quarters of these totals. Prices for tobacco rosethrough World War I, encouraging still more farmers to plant. By1921, acreage in tobacco for both Massachusetts and Connecticutwas nearly double what it had been ten years before. Connecticut’speak year for production was 1921, when the state’s growersproduced just over forty-five million pounds of tobacco on 31000acres.16

Although the acreages devoted to all three types of tobaccoincreased in the 1910s, shade tobacco production expanded mostdramatically. Shade-grown tobacco was first planted in Poquonock,Connecticut around 1900, following a series of soil and seed testsconducted by federal and state agricultural scientists.17 Despite aninitial burst of enthusiasm, only seventy acres of shade tobaccowere planted in New England in 1907. Just over ten years later,however, this had risen to nearly 8000da level around which ithovered for nearly two decadesdas shade’s success in the valleyattracted capital from investors, and as World War I disruptedglobal tobacco markets, creating new opportunities for Connecticutgrowers. Yields per acre of shade tobacco averaged around 1000pounds of leaf by the 1920s, and with an average price of about $1per pound, shade tobacco could be worth over three times the valueof Broadleaf and Havana Seed.18

Shade tobacco production centered on places where soil andmicro-climatic conditions were best suited to its production.Tobacco is a costly and risky crop, and the production of shadetobacco requires extra expenditures on tenting and labor. Conse-quently, shade tobacco’s expansion in the 1910s was marked bya consolidation of land into larger holdings (typically referred to asshade ‘plantations’), and a consolidation of power among a handfulof tobacco companies. By the late 1920s, eighteen companiesdorshade ‘growers’dhad solidified their control over shade

14 Ramsey, The history of tobacco production in the Connecticut Valley (note 12), 135–14Connecticut Valley Vernacular (note 13), 49–73.

15 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, 294–303.16 Hendrickson, An Economic Study of the Agriculture of the Connecticut Valley (note 1217 E.H. Jenkins, Shade Grown in 1901, The New England tobacco grower 1 (1902) 3, 6–

11–13, 16.18 Anderson, Tobacco Culture in Connecticut (note 13), 803–805; Ramsey, The History o19 McDonald, The History of Tobacco Production in Connecticut (note 12), 23–25.20 For an extended discussion of this point, see Fiege, Irrigated Eden (note 7).21 H.S. Gilman interviewed by E. Coltman, 23 October 1971, Manchester Community C

production, and in some cases, over packing, warehousing, andcigar manufacturing. Each company controlled hundreds of acres,either through outright ownership or through leasing arrange-ments with area farmers, and all promoted their interests througha series of trade associations, including the powerful Shade TobaccoGrowers Agricultural Association (STGAA).19

The production of shade tobacco depended on the growers’capacity to manipulate and exercise some measure of control overthe natural environment. Shade tents were an innovative means tothis end. They allowed growers to mimic a tropical climate byincreasing the temperature and humidity of their fields, whileallowing rain to reach the plants below. Growers could manipulatethis artificial climate further by opening and closing the sides of thetents during warmer or cooler periods. Their control, of course, wasnever absolute, as it never is farmers’ attempts to control naturalsystems.20 Hail and windstorms, and even fire, posed constantthreats to shade tobacco farms. Yet as we shall see, their ability tomanipulate nature at this scale, along with their efforts to puttogether an inexpensive labor force, made growers a powerful forcefor shaping landscape and identity in the valley.

Mobile children and the construction of landscapeand identity

As the scale of tobacco production grew in the Connecticut Valley,the need for larger, year-round and seasonal labor forces grew aswell. Outdoor tobacco farms, which tended to be smaller in size andsimpler to manage, relied on labor provided by family members,a hired man, neighbors, and at times ‘floaters’dsingle men who, asone farmer recalled, drifted onto and off area farms, particularlythose along rail lines.21 By contrast, shade plantations requireda larger labor force to perform additional tasks such as putting upand taking down tents, picking plants at repeated intervals, andprocessing leaves individually for curing. This demand for labor,multiplied by the expansion of shade tobacco acreage in the valley,meant that shade plantations were at the forefront of the ongoingcommercialization of the valley’s farm economy; investments inshade tobacco far exceeded those in neighboring dairy, vegetable,and outdoor tobacco farms.

Shade tobacco workers initially included a mix of men, women,and children drawn from rural communities, as well as regionaltowns and cities such as Hartford and Springfield. Many of theseworkersdwhether from cities, towns, or rural villagesdwererecent immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Lithuania, and manyworked both in year-round and seasonal positions on tobaccofarms. The Connecticut Valley had become an important destina-tion for French Canadian and Eastern European immigrants duringthe last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades ofthe twentieth. And while many of these new residents settled intourban factory jobs, many also worked on or purchased farms, andmany made a conscious effort to assimilate into the dominantAnglo culture in the valley. Some of those who worked shadetobacco lived in homes or boarding facilities on the plantations,others boarded locally during the growing season only, and others

6, 176–180; Anderson, Tobacco Culture in Connecticut (note 13), 729–761; O’Gorman,

), 37–59.7, 14; Professor Whitney’s report, The New England tobacco grower 1 (1902) 8–9,

f Tobacco Production in the Connecticut Valley (note 12), 163–170.

ollege Library, Manchester, CT.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168 161

traveled daily from towns to the fields. Employment cards revealthat recent Eastern European immigrants continued to work intobacco fields well into the 1930s.22

Urban children, many of whom were from immigrant families,became a critical part of this early labor force, and they constitutethe focus of the remainder of this section of the paper. In theabsence of a local, rural-based labor force large enough to do thework of harvesting and sewing, Connecticut growers recruited andbrought urban childrendsome as young as eightdto their farmsdaily to help fill the gap. The labor of these children, coupled withthe ability of growers to move them at a cost-effective rate from thecity to the farm, became critical to the construction and success ofshade tobacco’s economic landscape. But as important as theseseasonal workers were, we shall also see that their status as young,mobile workers posed a threat to growers’ interests. That threatand growers’ responses to it highlight the constructed nature ofrural identity in the region as well as the ongoing attempts made bygrowers to control circumstances surrounding the mobility of theirworkers in Tobacco Valley.

Demand for labor on commercial farms in the United States hasalways fluctuated seasonally from low periods during fallow timesor while crops are growing to a peak during the harvest season. Thismeans that growers are faced with the problem of finding a pool ofshort-term labor inexpensive enough to offset the capital tied up intheir crops during the growing season.23 Commercial growersthroughout the United States have long sought to keep labor costslow through the use of temporary and replaceable workers whothey fully expect to move on after the harvest, thereby eliminatingany responsibility on the part of growers for their long-termwelfare. Shade tobacco growers were no exception. But unlikegrowers in the American west who traditionally relied ona specialized class of migrant farmworkers, they and other east-coast growers typically seasonal workers from what historian CindyHahamovitch calls ‘functioning labor markets’. As Hahamovitchdemonstrates, east-coast growers recruited farm laborers fromamong groups such as rural black southerners, students, and urbanimmigrantsdgroups whose members often worked on commercialfarms to supplement other forms of income or to fill in periods ofdowntime in their annual schedules.24

Connecticut’s shade growers similarly tapped into functioninglabor markets, recruiting temporary workers from area villagesand towns who might otherwise hold different jobs. Competitionfrom munitions jobs in area factories, however, reduced thislabor force during the 1910sdjust as growers entered a criticalperiod of expansion in shade production. Children from valleytownsdHartford in particulardbecame critical to filling this gap inlabor. Children were relatively inexpensive and politically power-less workers by virtue of their age, their lack of skills, and theirproximity in large numbers to the shade fields, many of which werelocated just outside the city’s limits. These ‘day haul’ workers (as

22 For summaries of tobacco laborers, see O’Gorman, Connecticut Valley Vernacular (nConnecticut Valley Tobacco, n.p., 1982; R.A. Newfield, Tobacco and the Tobacco Laborer in thB.M. Tucker, Agricultural workers in World War II: the reserve army of children, black Amregion, see M. Hoberman, Yankee Moderns: Folk Regional Identity in the Sawmill Valley ofare located at the Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Tobacco Museum, Windsor, CT (hereafter L

23 Mitchell, Work, struggle, death, and geographies of justice (note 7).24 C. Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making25 Women, girls, and boys in great demand to harvest the tobacco crop, Hartford Couran

see Tucker, Agricultural workers in World War II (note 22); Schnip, Changing landscape26 Welles, Child Laborers in the Shade Grown Tobacco Industry of Connecticut (note 1), 127 Welles, Child Laborers in the Shade Grown Tobacco Industry of Connecticut (note 1), 7. A

D.C., 1926, 28–40.28 Byrne, Child Labor in Representative Tobacco Growing Areas (note 27), 31–32.29 Byrne, Child Labor in Representative Tobacco Growing Areas (note 27), 30–32.30 Byrne, Child Labor in Representative Tobacco Growing Areas (note 27), 38–39.

they came to be known) were first recruited in their neighborhoodsby local agents. Then, during the harvest, hundreds of urban chil-dren between the ages of eight and sixteendalong with grownwomen who commonly joined themdwere picked up and droppedoff daily at designated meeting spots in Hartford and elsewhere.25

As described in a 1918 report on tobacco labor: ‘One farm reportedthat they brought from seventy-five to a hundred grammar schoolchildren from a neighboring town every day; one automobile truckwhich left Hartford carried thirty-one small children, only twelvegrown women, and a few large boys.’ Others, the study added, rodetrolley cars from Hartford to nearby fields.26 A labor investigatorworking in 1917 counted 1458 children from eight to fifteen yearsof age in the valley’s sheds and fields, although other observerspresumed the real number was twice that. Roughly sixty percent ofthe workers in the fields were children under sixteen years old, androughly eighty percent of the workers in the sheds were underfifteen (Fig. 1).27

The ability to mobilize inexpensive child labor resident near thetobacco fields proved crucial to the valley’s growers, particularlyduring a critical period of expansion in shade production duringand immediately following World War I. Children were brought inon trucks at a modest cost to growers, and, even more importantly,they were shipped back home at night, relieving growers of theresponsibility and cost of providing housing or food. Moreover,children became indispensible to the completion of two key tasksin shade production: picking leaves and processing them for curingin the sheds. The majority of the boys brought from Hartford pickedtobacco in the shade tents. Most of them were between twelve andfourteen years old, although some were as young as eight. Theypicked leaves, selectively, during the harvest season, working theirway from the bottom of the plant upwards week by week as theleaves ripened. Small boys were typically preferred for this work, asit was low to the ground; at times boys had to crawl for days indense, hot rows to pick the lowest leaves.28 Girls worked almostexclusively in the long tobacco sheds, handling the leaves broughtin from the fields. Like the boys, most of these girls were in twele tofourteen years old. Shed work consisted of standing all day at tablesand stringing (or ‘sewing’) leaves onto twine fastened to lengths oflath, which were then given to men and older boys to hang in theoverhead rafters to cure.29 Day haul workers by the mid 1920scould make between $1.50 and $3.00 a day depending on the taskand the Stringers were paid at a piece rate of roughly fifty cents perbundle of fifty laths. Most girls could finish about four bundlesa day.30

Tasks such as these made urban children essential to thedevelopment and successful functioning of the two primarycomponents of the shade tobacco landscapedthe tents and thesheds. And in this respect, the ability of growers to move childworkers from cities and towns to rural farms each day madepossible the material transformation of the Connecticut Valley into

ote 13), 35–46; A. Schnip and K. Williamson, Changing Landscape Through People:e Connecticut Valley, Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, Philadelphia, 1936;ericans, and Jamaicans, Agricultural History 68 (1994) 54–73. On immigration to the

Western Massachusetts, 1890–1920, Knoxville, 2000, xxix–xxxvii. Employment cardsTCTM).

of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945, Chapel Hill, 1997, 6. Also see 14–37.t, 19 August 1917, 6. For summaries of child labor in Connecticut tobacco fields, alsoThrough People (note 22)..lso see H.A. Byrne, Child Labor in Representative Tobacco Growing Areas, Washington

Fig. 1. Hartford children on their way to the tobacco fields. These workersdmostly young girls and boysdwere being picked up at 6:00 AM when this photograph was taken.Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, August 7, 1917. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168162

a center of shade production. That process was accompanied aswell by a transformation in the identity of the valley’s rural land-scape. The mobility and youth of so many of the area’s seasonalworkers shaped this transformation in the valley in specific ways.For although seasonal, non-local laborers were essential togrowers, their very presence in the valley complicated andthreatened growers’ reputations and the reputations of theindustry and landscape they had created.

This relationship played out across a number of fronts. Someresidents regarded non-local seasonal workersdchildren andothersdas a threat by virtue of their unfamiliarity, and theirtemporary, transitory nature. As Cresswell has pointed out, westerncultures often privilege fixity and stability as social ideals, therebycalling mobility into question as threatening to prevailing socialand cultural orders.31 Cresswell offers the case of the ‘tramp’ inAmerica as an example. Increasing numbers of itinerant workersmoved about the American landscape in search of work during the1870s, Cresswell notes, threatening to disrupt popular, middle classnotions of respectability based on domesticity and rootedness.32

Similarly, an effort in Connecticut in the 1910s to secure temporary,non-local workers resulted in what one commentator described asthe importation of ‘two hundred girls of the worst type’ from NewYork City who ‘straightaway proceeded to demoralize’ the town inwhich they worked and who made themselves ‘obnoxiouslyconspicuous in the city of Hartford’.33 Concerns about the characterof tobacco workers whether warranted or not extended into thedepression years of the 1930s, when wandering men came andwent through the valley looking for work, and when desperate

31 Cresswell, On the Move (note 10), 26–42.32 T. Cresswell, The Tramp in America, London, 2001.33 C.S. Johnson, The Negro Population of Hartford, Connecticut, New York, 1921, 25.34 Newfield, Tobacco and the tobacco laborer in the Connecticut Valley (note 22), 45–4935 Newfield, Tobacco and the tobacco laborer in the Connecticut Valley (note 22), 49.

urban residents competed for jobs aggressively and withoutapparent remorse at daily pick up locations.34 Commenting ontobacco workers as a whole, one decidedly unsympatheticresearcher reported: ‘By way of summary of the tobacco worker, Iwould say he is a low class individual. Bright spots do turnupdsometimes one plantation will have workers that are far abovethe leveldbut as a group they are very unskilled agriculturalworkers. On the whole they have not found themselvesdthey aremaladjusted individuals in the lower order of society’.35

The youthfulness of many seasonal workers only added to suchperceptions, and further tarnished growers’ reputations. Begin-ning in the early 1930s, representatives from the ConnecticutDepartment of Labor began inspecting tobacco farms, oftenuncovering deplorable living and working conditions. The plightof urban children became a particular source of concern in stateand public opinion, particularly in the absence of child agricul-tural labor laws, which Connecticut did not have on the booksuntil 1947, ostensibly to avoid interfering with the individualdecisions of farm families who might need or want to put theirchildren to work on the farm. In an effort to stall or head offlegislation limiting the use of young childrendwhether urban orruraldand to avoid increased state oversight and regulation oflabor practices on farms, the state’s largest shade growers forgeda ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in 1927, promising not to employchildren under the age of fourteen. Similar ‘voluntary’ agreementswere again reached between the STGAA and the state departmentof labor in 1933 and 1941. The first two of these agreements,however, were either ignored or nearly impossible to enforce, and

.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168 163

the last came with restrictions on the state’s ability to inspectshade plantations on its own terms.36

Connecticut’s child-labor reformers in the 1930s and 1940sfocused on a number of issues in addition to age, including workingconditions, pay, hours, and most importantly for our purposes, thelogistics of daily transportation for children from area towns to thefields. Anxieties about the daily mobility of urban children centeredon the time that transportation added to their workday (sometimesas much as one or two extra hours) as well as their safety on theroad. Children were often crowded into cars or forced to stand inopen trucks to get to the fields, and area newspapers periodicallycarried sensational reports of accidents and deaths en route to thefields.37 Parents and reformers increasingly voiced their concernsabout the dangers of mobility among child laborers, forcinggrowers to offer defensive public assurances that day-haul workerswould receive safe, reliable transportation.

Concerns about the safety of children on the move ultimatelyhelped fuel public pressure to enact age, hourly, and otherrestrictions on agricultural labor under Connecticut’s 1947 ChildLabor Bill. These concerns also captured the essence of mobility’srelationship to landscape and identity in the Connecticut Valley:non-local seasonal workers were essential to the growth andmaintenance of the shade tobacco landscape, but public concernsabout their mobility coupled with concerns about their age alsochallenged the reputation and self-interests of the growers whofinanced shade tobacco’s development. Consequently, growersbegan an active public-relations campaign in the early 1940sdesigned to bolster their imageda move that can be read, in part, asa response to the kinds of criticisms noted above. Acting throughtheir trade associations and the press, spokesmen for growers likethe STGAA’s powerful mid-century executive director, Ralph C.Lasbury, commonly suggested that corporate tobacco production,its participants, and the landscape they created were entirelycompatible with traditionalized and highly favorable conceptionsof New England’s agricultural heritage popular throughout thetwentieth century.

Here growers turned for inspiration and guidance to culturallyconstructed notions about rural New England emphasizing char-acteristics such as stability, tradition, and community. New Englandand its Yankee residents had for generations been idealized inpopular literature, imagery, and tourist promotions as representa-tives of a Jeffersonian agricultural ideal, giving the region and itsfarms a privileged cultural position as centers of virtue, tradition,and rural exceptionalism.38 Drawing on this established set ofperspectives, growers sought to control group and place-basedidentities by shepherding them in particular ways. On one level,this was expressed in their representations of the shade tobaccolandscapeda landscape some suggested, which blended naturallyinto the region’s larger rural scene. One observer described the

36 Newfield, Tobacco and the tobacco laborer in the Connecticut Valley (note 22), 17, 35; J.Jlabor, 3–6, copy available at: http://www.trincoll.edu/UG/UE/HSP/Collection_PD.htm. Theof the growing of shade tobacco in the Connecticut Valley and working conditions in shade

37 Tucker, Agricultural workers in World War II (note 22), 57.38 For more on this point, see J.A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Re

Harrison, Tourism, farm abandonment and ‘typical’ Vermonters, 1880–1930, Journal of Hand The Making of an American Rural Landscape, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2006. For a goosee W.S. Lee, The Yankees of Connecticut, New York, 1957.

39 Vacation work presents new adventure to hundreds of high school youths, in: VacatiAgricultural Extension Service, [Hartford], (1944), unnumbered; quote is on the first page

40 The Story of Tobacco Valley (note 13), 28.41 The Story of Tobacco Valley (note 13), 9.42 Imperial Agricultural Corporation, Tobacco-land in Old New England: How Yankee inge

prosperous agricultural business in a great industrial area, Hartford, [c. 1945].43 How Connecticut’s world-famous shade cigar wrapper tobacco will be grown this yea44 Imperial Agricultural Corporation, Tobacco-land in Old New England (note 42), unnu

shade landscape as such: ‘From a distance, these gently rollingcovered acres look like miniature lakes set in the beautiful Con-necticut landscape, but as the traveler approaches, the miragechanges to fields of lush green Shadegrown [sic] tobacco’.39 Farfrom a shocking or even unnatural aberration on the landscape,then, shade seemed anything but out of place. Moreover, tobaccofarming may have grown tremendously in scale and complexity bymid century, but by some accounts it remained true to its naturalroots and true to agrarianism’s best qualities rather than becoming,say, an industrialized, impersonal activity. As described by theSTGAA, ‘Shade Growing is strictly an agricultural enterprise and notindustrial, as it is sometimes erroneously called. It is agriculture bynature and by practice for Shade Tobacco is a product of the soil, notof a machine. It is no more industrial than an apple orchard, a dairyfarm or a truck garden’.40

On another level, this attempt to reconcile shade productionwith the region’s perceived heritage informed the self-identity ofgrowers, who at times posited themselves and the farmers whoworked for them as heirs to a proud Yankee heritage of resource-fulness and hard work. By some accounts, that heritage wasembodied within the shade landscape they created. New Englandtobacco farmers were a clever lot, such perspectives claimed; in theabsence of a tropical climate, for instance, shade farmers simplycreated shade tents, or ‘a man-made air-conditioning system thatproduces a New England version of tropical atmospheres.’ Theresult, the STGAA boasted, was that ‘There is no better wrappertobacco grown anywhere in the world, even in Sumatra’.41 Simi-larly, a 1940s publication by the Imperial Agricultural Corporationentitled Tobacco-Land in Old New England summarized this senti-ment explicitly in its lengthy subtitle, which read: How YankeeIngenuity Defied Nature; Brought Tropical Climate to Connecticut;Created an Important and Prosperous Agricultural Business in a GreatIndustrial Area.42 In the view of another commentator, tobaccofarmers embodied Yankee fortitude and resourcefulness in the faceof the many challenges and risks to an annual tobacco crop: ‘TheConnecticut Yankee is a thorough-going, hard-working, ‘never-say-die’ individual, and it is hard for him to give up the life that heand his ancestors before him have led’.43

References to ancestors such as this suggest another importantstrain in growers’ self-constructed identities. By mid century,growers commonly depicted themselves as descendents of a longline of New England families, thereby promoting an image ofrootedness, community, and family centered farming. Accordingto the Imperial Agricultural Corporation, ‘The tobacco farmersand their families are mostly New Englanders from ‘way back’.Many have been growing shade tobacco for more than a genera-tion’.44 Similarly, a profile of grower and president of the STGAA,Nelson A. Shepard, stressed that he was descended from ‘one ofthe oldest families in Connecticut and New England [whose

. Egan, Report of the 1946 inspection of tobacco fields by the Connecticut department offollowing report is attached to the Egan citation in this note: R.C. Lasbury, A historytobacco farms.

gional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-twentieth Century, Chapel Hill, 2001; B.istorical Geography 31 (2005) 478–495; B. Harrison, The View from Vermont: Tourismd example of a related discourse on Yankee identity from mid-century Connecticut,

on work with the Shade Tobacco Growers Agricultural Association, Inc. and Connecticut.

nuity defied nature; brought tropical climate to Connecticut; created an important and

r on 10,000 acres in the valley of the long river Connecticut Circle 11 (June 1948) 12.mbered; from page entitled ‘Workers in the industry’.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168164

ancestors] settled with the early Pilgrims in Cambridge,Massachusetts.’45

Here then was a self-constructed identity defined by charac-teristics like stability and tradition. Here was an identity embodiedby growers and an agrarian landscape that seemed entirely in linewith celebratory images of rural New England. The frequency withwhich imagery like this was invoked across a range of print mediaat mid century suggests that its use was part of a larger attemptamong some in the valley to come to terms with broader changes inthe region’s twentieth-century economy, demographics, and landuse. In this shade growers were not alone; residents throughoutNew England worked for decades to adjust materially andconceptually to modernity and its effects on the region’s rurallandscape and identity, at times with a sense of anxiety andremorse.46 As Michael Hoberman points out, early twentieth-century Yankee identitydparticularly in the uplands surroundingthe Connecticut Valleyddid not go unchanged by this encounterwith modernity, despite a tendency among many cultural observersthen and now to classify Yankees as stoic and resistant to change.Instead, Hoberman argues, rural New Englanders often ‘adaptedquite competently to the changing conditions of their lives’.47

Seen in this light, the tendency for growers to constructa traditional identity for the people and land of the valley was lessreactionary than an act of adaptation meant to blend an idealizedpast with complicated contemporary circumstances inspired, inlarge part, by growers themselves. Tobacco growers definedthemselves as keepers of rural traditionalism in New England, evenas they participated in the creation of a very different kind ofeconomic landscape.48 Their efforts to reconcile this fact mimickedthose of commercial growers elsewhere in the nation, who asCletus Daniel has argued, worked diligently to protect their statusand investments in part by constructing an image for themselvesand the landscapes they created that was compatible with popularnational narratives about small-scaled family farming.49 InConnecticut, as elsewhere, this was predicated partly on growers’needs to protect their interests by maintaining control over labor.Throughout the 1940s, Connecticut’s shade growers wouldcontinue to seek control over their workers and the potentialimpact those workers could have on growers’ carefully constructedself-identity. One means for doing so was to control the mechanicsand the meaning of labor mobility itself. Two sets of additionalworkers brought to the valley at this time would provide a need andan opportunity to do just that.

Controlling mobility at mid-century

The valley’s cigar-based tobacco economy suffered a modestdecline during the late 1920s and early 1930s, due in large part togrowing competition from cigarettes. Acreage levels of all varieties

45 A century in tobacco raising, Connecticut Circle 11 (June 1948) 18.46 On adjusting to modernity in New England, see P.M. Searls, Two Vermonts: Geography

The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930, Chapel Hill, 1997.47 Hoberman, Yankee moderns (note 22), ix.48 For a related discussion, see Fiege, Irrigated Eden (note 7), 171–202.49 Daniel, Bitter harvest, 15–39. Also see M. Garcia, A World of its Own: Race, Labor an

D. Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875–1920, BaltimoCalifornia, Boston, 1939.

50 Schnip, Changing landscape through people (note 22); Anderson, Tobacco Culture in Co(note 12), 26–27.

51 Schnip, Changing landscape through people (note 22).52 Lasbury, A history of the growing of shade tobacco (note 36), 3.53 On federal support for labor recruitment, see Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor54 F.C. Johnson, Soldiers of the Soil, New York, 1995.55 Recent discussions of race and labor relations among farmworkers include Garcia, A

fell, including a drop in Connecticut’s shade tobacco acreage from7300 in 1929 to below 4000 in 1932.50 These numbers turnedaround by the early 1940s, as wartime disruptions to world tobaccomarkets increased demand for Connecticut tobacco. Once again,though, shade companies had to compete for workers withwartime industries, raising concerns about labor shortages duringthe harvest season.51 Competition from factory jobs, coupled withnegative public opinion about child labor, prompted growers tolook more than ever before for labor from beyond the borders ofNew England. By 1946, STGAA figures for year-round and seasonalworkers in shade tobacco stood at over 18 000. An estimated 3500of these were ‘migratory and seasonal workers’ who were ‘lodgedand fed in establishments operated for periods ranging from a fewweeks to the entire year’.52

This ‘migratory and seasonal’ labor came primarily from twostreams, both of which depended in some measure on federalsupport for recruitment and management.53 The first stream con-sisted of roughly 2000 Jamaicans who came to Connecticut undera national labor program begun in 1943 and administered throughthe United States Department of Agriculture’s War Food Adminis-tration.54 A second stream consisted of high school and collegestudents brought to Connecticut from states to the American south.These students broke down into two primary groups: white highschool girls from Florida and Pennsylvania and African Americanboys and young men from high schools and colleges in Georgia,Alabama, and other southern states. I explore each in turn for whatthey reveal about the mobility of extra-regional tobacco workers.

As in other regions of the country, twentieth-century growers inthe Connecticut Valley became increasingly more systematic intheir labor recruitment strategies. One expression of this was thetendency among growers to target certain groups according to raceor according to who seemed most likely to accept low wages.55

College students from the American south were in some ways idealshade tobacco workers: they were young, adventurous, and strong,and many were looking for work to help defray education costs,rather than support a family, making them perhaps less likely todemand higher pay. But because of their racial and cultural differ-ences from residents in rural Connecticut, and because of theirinclination to venture away from their camps during their free time,these workers also raised new questions about the mobility of non-local seasonal workers. Consequently, growers saw a need and anopportunity to exert some measure of control over the both themeaning and the literal mechanics of mobility among studentsbrought north to work tobacco.

This pattern was expressed in a number of different ways. Tobegin, growers worked through the press to shape how arearesidents understood migrants moving to and among the valley’stobacco fields. All migrant farm workdtobacco work includeddis‘embodied’ in the sense that it is performed by people whose

and Identity, 1865–1910, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2006; H. S. Barron, Mixed Harvest:

d Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970, Chapel Hill, 2001, 17–46;re, 1999; C. McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in

nnecticut (note 13), 726; McDonald, The history of tobacco production in Connecticut

(note 24).

World of its Own (note 49), 47–78; Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor (note 24).

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168 165

bodies, in Don Mitchell’s terms, ‘are marked by ideologies of raceand gender, or more generally of inferiority’.56 Race and genderwere, indeed, implicated in the definitions of mobility as it devel-oped in the valley at mid century, but the outright inferiority ofstudent migrants was not a foregone conclusion. Students wereattractive to growers for a number of reasons, not the least of whichwas that they had someplace to go once the harvest was done. Thisneed to keep workers moving on is a pressing problem for growersnationally, and as Mitchell has argued, it is often a problem growerstry to solve by conditioning workers through violence, direct andindirect, intentional and unintentional, in the fields, in the camps,at border crossings, and in their home countries.57 By contrast,Connecticut’s student workersdyoung women and African Amer-icans alikedenjoyed more freedom and better treatment than theLatin American workers Mitchell has described. What might bemore appropriate to say in their case is that growers to treatedthem paternalisticallydand in doing so, they not only disciplinedtheir young workers, they developed ways to cast the mobility ofsome students in unthreatening and self-serving terms.58

One opportunity to do this emerged from a partnership formedin 1943 between Carl Strode, the principal of Sarasota High Schoolin Florida and Ralph Lasbury, his former college friend and nowdirector of the STGAA. Strode and Lasbury arranged to have a groupof twenty-five high-school boysd‘volunteers’ they were called, not‘migrants’dto work (for pay) on a Connecticut tobacco farm for thesummer.59 The success of that program, coupled with wartimelabor shortages and a need for stringers (always a job reserved forwomen) encouraged Strode to recruit 150 high school girls fromFlorida to make the trip north for the summer of 1944. More fol-lowed each year, and the program continued into the 1960s.60

Scores of high school girls from Pennsylvania also came northduring the 1940s, settling alongside their Florida counterparts inroughly a dozen camps throughout the valley. The program was runinitially with support from the federal government’s Victory FarmVolunteers program and the Women’s Land Army, and it wasadministered as a partnership between the University ofConnecticut’s Agricultural Extension Service and the STGAA.

The recruitment and importation of white, southern high schoolgirls gave Lasbury and the STGAA a unique opportunity to constructa positive public identity for growers, in part by underminingnegative public associations between migrant laborers and socialgroups who were either racially or socially ‘undesirable’ or whowere economically oppressed by their employers. By all accounts,white southern girls were depicted as having come from goodbackgrounds, and they were well cared for by their employerswhile in Connecticut. In this respect, growers were not unlikepaternalistic mill owners in the Merrimack Valley during the midnineteenth century, who sought to attract female employees fromrural households, to head-off criticisms of labor practices, and toregulate the social and moral behavior of women mill workers by

56 Mitchell, The Lie of the Land (note 7), 10.57 D. Mitchell, The Devil’s arm: points of passage, networks of violence, and the Califo58 Also see S. Lewthwaite, Race, paternalism, and ‘California Pastoral’: rural rehabilitat59 Florida boys earn praise of growers, Hartford Courant, 29 August 1943, 6.60 Vacation work experience highly beneficial to youths, says high school principal, in Va

Young people grew the 1944 Conn shade crop, The Tobacco Leaf, 11November 1944, 14.61 T. Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Ma62 Work experiences for Florida students, The Journal of the Florida Education Associa

Agricultural Association; Teenagers harvest tobacco crop, Look Magazine 12 (23 Novembe63 P. Roney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Mid64 Life on state tobacco farm not all hard labor, Hartford Times, 7 August 1945.65 Imperial Agricultural Corporation, Tobacco-land in Old New England (note 42), ‘Work66 Local girls are enjoying work on Connecticut shade tobacco farms, unidentified Flor

providing adequate housing, educational opportunities, and otheramenities.61 Caring for and cultivating an image of a contentedwork force went hand-in-hand with advancing the reputation andinterests of employers, whether in the factories of Lowell, Massa-chusetts or the shade tents of the Connecticut Valley. Young womenfrom the south were therefore cast as contented, non-threateningseasonal workers, making them appear compatible with thevalley’s idealized social and cultural fabric.

The twin contexts of recreation and education gave Lasbury andother image makers important rhetorical material with which tomake this case. Area papers and regional and national tradepublications frequently published articles and photographsdescribing the ‘attractive’ and ‘lively’ girls from Florida who camenorth to work. But as the program’s directors were quick to pointout, work was not all they came to do: girls came north to play aswell. This was a key point. Lasbury and Strode deliberately modeledtheir program after recreational summer camps common in NewEngland at the time; the girls lived in camps supervised by schoolofficials from their home states, and located in attractive, naturalsettings, often on lakes. Such settings made it easier to couch theprogram in the language of vacationing rather than toil. Free time atcamp, for instance, was filled with wholesome recreational activi-ties such as swimming, softball, badminton, reading, beautypageants, and dances with the Florida boys living in other areacamps.62 Work was considered a formative part of the girls’ expe-riences, echoing long-standing cultural ideas in the United Statestreating farm work as a healthy, character building activity forchildren.63 But work for these students was often treated in thepopular press as equal, if not secondary to vacationing. ‘Life on StateTobacco Farm not all Hard Labor,’ one headline stated, adding: ‘HighSchool Lassies Work and Play at Tobacco Camps’.64 ‘College girlsand high school girls from many states spend the summer helpingout in the tobacco fields,’ the Imperial Agricultural Corporationadded. ‘They do most of the light work and consider their summertime spent on Connecticut’s shade-grown tobacco farms to be moreof a vacation than an arduous occupation’ (Fig. 2).65

Whether or not all the girls considered ‘helping out’ on tobaccofarms ‘more of a vacation than an arduous occupation’ is open fordebate. Surely the freedom and adventure of a summer away fromhome was exciting for some, but other, dissatisfied girls left early inthe season, and nearly all struggled to drag themselves out of bed inthe morning to go to work, and were only too happy to see the endof their work day.66 A trip to Connecticut was unquestionably a tripto a working landscape. Nonetheless, the public discourse ofvacationing advanced by the STGAA obscured girls’ labor in favor ofa sanitized image of recreation. As a range of scholarship hasshown, all landscapes are the product of work, yet landscapes oftenerase expressions of that work by virtue of their representations.The net results are, on the one hand, a misrepresentation of thelabor and social relations embedded in any place, and on the other,

rnia agricultural landscape, New Formations 43 (2001) 44–60.ion and Mexican labor in Greater Los Angeles, Agricultural History 81 (2007) 1–35.

cation work with the Shade Tobacco Growers Agricultural Association; D. M. Rockwell,

ssachusetts, 1826–1860, New York, 1979.tion (December 1944) 15–16, 28; Vacation work with the Shade Tobacco Growersr 1948): 109–116.

west, Lawrence, KS, 2005, 10–35.

ers in the industry.’ida newspaper, summer 1945, copy located in the 1945 scrapbook at the LTCTM.

Fig. 2. Recruitment booklet for southern high school students. With a smiling, clean, fresh-looking girl on the front cover and the word ‘vacation’ figuring prominently in the title,publications like this tended to downplay the labor involved in tobacco harvesting. Used by Permission of the Luddy/Taylor Tobacco Museum, Windsor, CT.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168166

the construction of a landscape image capable of serving theinterests of one group or another.67 In the case of Connecticuttobacco, a public focus on vacationing at the expense of laborserved the interests of growers, for whom it was always beneficialto cast their use of seasonal laborers in a benign, even positive way.Growers crafted a public image suggesting that these werewholesome young people who were by no means threatening tothe communities in which they worked. These were young peopleon vacation, and in this regard, they were not that different fromany other group of young summer campers in New England.

This last point was particularly important. It was useful from thestandpoint of public perception for growers to be able to argue thatthese were wholesome, non-threatening kids. But it was even moreuseful to be able to argue that their mobilitydtheir ability to cometo New England for a summerdwas in and of itself an educationalexperience. Carl Strode argued this point forcefully in a letter to theleadership of the Victory Farm Volunteers, claiming: ‘The oppor-tunity to see how people live in other places, to see historic points

67 Mitchell, The Lie of the Land (note 7), R. Williams, The Country and the City, New YoColorado landscape, 1858–1917, Journal of American History 92 (2005) 837–863. Also see

68 C. Strode to Dr. S.B. Hall, no date, excerpted in, Vacation work experience highly bene1944 Conn shade crop (note 60). On work and vacationing, see Harrison, The View from VeNew York, 1999.

of interest, to visit some of the larger cities, and to experienceconditions different from their home environment are some of themost important factors to be considered..[G]eography and historybecome much more meaningful to these young people who havehad an opportunity to experience some of the things that our youngpeople experienced this summer’.68 Seen in this way, then, theSTGAA was to be applauded for their use of these youngsters. Thesewere not wayward, shiftless workers, nor were they being abused;they were students who were learning from their encounters withother peoples and other places.

Shade tobacco’s supporters in the press applied similar kinds ofarguments to African American students who came from southernhigh schools and colleges under a comparable program, althoughnever were they applied with the same frequency or intensity asthey were for the girls. African American migrants from the southfirst worked in Connecticut’s tobacco fields in 1916 when repre-sentatives from shade companies and the National Urban Leaguerecruited a handful of African American families as well as 1400

rk, 1973; T.G. Andrews, ‘Made by toile’? tourism, labor, and the construction of theHarrison, The View from Vermont (note 38).

ficial to youths, says high school principal. Also see Rockwell, Young people grew thermont (note 38), C. Aron, Working at play: A history of vacationing in the United States,

Fig. 3. African American students in front of tobacco barn, 1942. Young men like these were valuable assets to local farmersdjust as long, some argued, as they focused on theirwork and stayed close to camp. Used by permission.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168 167

college students to help fill wartime labor needs. More studentsfollowed in subsequent years.69 Reliance on African Americanstudents tapered off during the 1920s and 1930s, but it picked upagain, along with the recruitment of white students, during WorldWar II. Hundreds made the trip each year from high schools andblack colleges such as Morehouse and Tuskegee to live (like theirwhite counterparts) in highly supervised, racially segregated campsscattered throughout Tobacco Valley. Among them was MartinLuther King, Jr. who worked two summers in Simsbury, Connecticutthrough the Morehouse program (Fig. 3).

Camp yearbooks and newsletters reveal that the program’sdirectors encouraged the young men to view their experience as aneducational exercise as well as an opportunity to commune withother like-minded youth about how to improve the lives of AfricanAmericans back home in the south.70 For many, their experiences inthe north were indeed eye-opening. King, for one, recalled later thefreedom he felt at being able to eat and sit where he pleased inpublic; others recalled encountering ‘far more freedom than wewere accustomed to’.71 Interactions with local whites took placeprimarily through work (field supervisors were always white,though camp directors were not), and through church services andpublic singing events featuring glee clubs from the local camps.72

Nothing in the historical record suggests that African American

69 Negro college students help solve tobacco labor problem, Hartford Courant, 13 Augu70 The Consolidated Collegiate Center annual for the 1946 season, copy located in the 194

LTCTM.71 C.S. King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., London, 1970, 99; A. Wood, Blacks rec72 Hear plantation singers on Times portico Thursday, Hartford Times, 25 August 1943;73 Wood, Blacks recall Connecticut tobacco farms (note 71); comments of S.B. Loucks,74 Tucker, Agricultural workers in World War II (note 22), 61.

students in Connecticut were widely disliked or routinely illtreated. Contemporary and later accounts by the students tend tofocus largely on positive experiences. Area residents also recall thestudents as being ‘very nice, agreeable students,’ and like theirwhite counterparts, they were praised by shade executives for theirhard work.73 But some residents at the time perceived the youngmen differently and acted accordingly. About 1000 African Amer-ican youths came north in 1942, for instance, but many weredeemed ‘delinquents’ and rejected by local farmers and othercommunity members.74

Concerns about delinquency found expression in relatedconcerns about the mobility of African American students withinthe valley itself. Here there are instructive distinctions betweenthese students and white southern girlsddistinctions that speak tothe racialization of mobility. The importation of white girls intothe valley was represented universally as a positive thing, both forthe valley and for the girls. For African Americans it was slightlydifferent. Their ability to come north was touted as a positiveexperience for them, and certainly their work was appreciated bymost farmers. Yet their mobility within the valley at times raisedconcerns about young black men lounging aimlessly in area townswhere they seemed bound to cause trouble. Some students recallbeing confined to camp except during special, monitored outings,

st 1916, 5; Johnson, The Negro population of Hartford, Connecticut (note 33), 25–29.6 scrapbook, LTCTM. O-Tee Times 1 (July 1947), copy located in the 1947 scrapbook,

all Connecticut tobacco farms, Journal Inquirer [Manchester, CT], 17 (July 1989), 21.The annual sing, copy located in the 1949 scrapbook, LTCTM.

O-Tee Times 1 (August 1947), 6, copy located in the 1947 scrapbook, LTCTM.

B. Harrison / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 157–168168

although others recall visiting friends at other African Americancamps or taking unmonitored trips into Hartford on a regionalbus.75 Whether free to move around or strictly confined, however,there was a clear concern in the valley that young men mightwander too much or too aimlessly during their free time. Explorationfor white girls was highly encouraged as educational, albeit whenpart of a structured program, yet exploration for young AfricanAmerican men was perceived by some as a threat in need ofcontainment.

One way to control the mobility of these students was to keepthem as busy as possible during their off hours. The ConnecticutCouncil of Churchesda coalition of Protestant con-gregationsdassumed formal leadership in this regard, sponsoringmusical and sporting events, and running recreational centers onthe camps and in the towns to keep young African American menoccupied. Their goal, according to one commentator, was ‘To keepthese men healthy, happy and entertained, off the highways andstreet corners, where they might otherwise be forced to loaf’.76 Ifone wanted to prevent idle students from leaning against lamppoles, then, one needed to arrange purposefully for their free time.‘Lounging against lamp poles in towns near the camps is not helpfulto either the fellows themselves, or the townspeople,’ the samewriter cautioned. ‘Why not help keep them off the street corners?.It’s best for you and for them’.77

As a racially inflected quote like this suggests, the ways inwhich growers and their supporters approached mobility differedbetween African American students and white southern girls byvirtue of differing associations between mobility and recreation.In the case of the white girls, recreation served the more light-hearted purpose of entertainment and frivolity, while for theAfrican American boys, recreation served to entertain as well as tocontain, thereby seeming to protect the social order in valleytowns as well as the standing of the tobacco corporations whoemployed them. Both groups became part of a larger set of effortsdesigned to control the meaning of mobility in ways that made itseem benign or beneficial and to control the mechanics ofmobility to diffuse racialized concerns about strangers in valleycommunities.

75 L. Adams interviewed by D.H. Bobryk, 19 August 2004, in the folder, ‘Notes re: Virginmanhood began, 3, typed manuscript in the folder, ‘TW John E Rodgers AACC,’ SHS;AACC,’ SHS.

76 H.W. Betz, Tobacco plantation, Hartford Courant Magazine, 9 (August 1942), 7.77 See note 76.

Conclusion

Mobility among seasonal farmworkersdwhether those workerswere from Hartford or the Ameircan southdplayed a central rolein shaping landscape and identity in Connecticut’s TobaccoValley. On the one hand, the valley’s agricultural landscape couldnot have evolved as it did without the importation of hundreds,even thousands, of temporary workers each year to harvest andprocess the valley’s tobacco crop. On the other hand, this wasa landscape whose identity was shaped by growers’ attempts tomitigate public perceptions of their workers. For as essential asthey were, non-local, mobile workers also came with perceivedrisks, forcing growers and other local residents to cast them-selves and the landscapes they created in terms of traditionalsentiments about social and cultural life in rural New England.

The agricultural landscape of the Connecticut Valley was a placeshaped in important ways by the context of mobile, seasonal labor.By focusing on that context, I believe that we can glimpse thecontours of a new historical geography for twentieth-centuryagriculture and rural development, not just in Connecticut, butthroughout New England as a whole. Histories of New Englandagriculture are filled with references to outmigration and its effectson the region’s economy, social structure, and landscape. And forgood reason; outmigration was clearly an important act in theregion’s agricultural history. What is missing from that history,however, is a focus on in-migration, a focus on the temporaryimportation of non-local agricultural workers into the region’s ruraldistricts. By shifting our perspective on human mobility relative torural New England, and by extending the discussion of thatmobility into the twentieth century we can begin to generate newkinds of questions about the history of the region’s rural landscape.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the paper’s two anonymous reviewers,Graeme Wynn, Matt Garcia, Sara Gregg, Tom Robertson, andparticipants in the Boston Environmental History Seminar for theirthoughtful comments on this work.

ia tobacco workers,’ SHS; W. S. Spencer, The summer my fun ended and my journey toAlbert Ayers [Recollections], typed manuscript in the folder, ‘TW John E Rodgers