This photo provided by the Agawam Historical Association shows an Agawam farmer cultivating his crop of shade tobacco. The association is hosting a talk on shade tobacco history August 24 at the Thomas Smith House.
Reminder Publishing submitted photo
AGAWAM — As a 14-year-old growing up in Windsor, Connecticut, during the 1950s, Duane Adams earned 61 cents per hour working on tobacco farms. In college and in in the Army, he had difficultly convincing people that tobacco was grown in the Connecticut River Valley.
Today, the retired high school history teacher who spent 46 years working on shade tobacco farms, is still trying to convince people that tobacco is grown in the area. The Agawam Historical Association is hosting a one-hour presentation by Adams — “Shade Tobacco in the Connecticut Valley — on Aug. 24 at the Thomas Smith House.
Currently a member of the board of directors for the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum in Windsor, Connecticut, Adams will talk about the history of shade tobacco and why tobacco is still grown in Agawam and other parts of the Connecticut River Valley — which covers the area from just south of Middletown, Connecticut, and north to southern Vermont. His goal is to help educate people about the history of the cigar tobacco agriculture industry in this area.
Adams said while it’s easy to think that people in his age group — who grew up with shade tobacco fields everywhere — wouldn’t need any education about tobacco, many of them don’t realize how much work is necessary to produce a tobacco leaf for a cigar wrapper.
According to the historical association, there were more than 200 tobacco sheds in Agawam; in 1915. Only a handful remain today — including one near the Smith House on North West Street.
Tobacco was widely grown on farms throughout Agawam and Feeding Hills from the mid-1800s through the 1970s — some shade, but mostly broadleaf. It’s still grown in Agawam today, but on a smaller scale.
The historical association said that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Hinsdale Smith/Cuba Connecticut Tobacco Company raised hundreds of acres of tobacco at what is now the Agawam Regional Industrial Park and the Tuckahoe Turf Farm/Still Brook.
In the 1920s, there was approximately 30,000 acres of tobacco cultivated in the region. Now, the museum reports that only 25 acres of shade tobacco is grown here. The region’s shade tobacco, known for its light color and mild, creamy flavor, was, and still is, prized as wrappers of premium cigar, said Adams.
He said tobacco was grown in this area because of the climate — tobacco does well in a hot humid environment — and the soil, created by an ice dam during the last Ice Age.
Tobacco farming in the Connecticut River Valley was already being grown by the native population when the first settlers arrived in the 1600s. It was primarily used in pipes, but the popularity of cigars eventually overtook pipe smoking.
The use of Connecticut Valley tobacco as a cigar wrapper leaf began in the 1820s., with farmers growing tobacco for the two outside layers of cigars, the binder and the wrapper. Tobacco farmers began experimenting with different seeds and processing techniques in the 1830s.
In the early 1900s, farmers started growing tobacco under shade tents made of cloth to cut sunlight and raise humidity. To form the shade tents, a tobacco field is set with posts in a grid layout, with wires stretched from post to post. The light, durable fabric — once made of cotton, but now a synthetic fiber — is tied across the posts and draped along the sides.
“Connecticut Valley shade tobacco was — and perhaps still is — seen as the gold standard for the cigar wrapper leaf,” said Adams. “While shade tobacco has almost disappeared from the valley, broad leaf cultivation is doing quite well and there are new curing sheds being built each year. Even if you don’t smoke cigars, those farms today are protecting large areas from becoming the next mall or the next neighborhood.”.
Finding workers has always been an issue for tobacco farmers in the area, said Adams. During World War II, farmers recruited college students from Black colleges in the south. In the 1950s, farmers depended on high school students for workers.
“You had to be 14 years old, and for many like myself it was not a question of will I work on tobacco, but rather for which farm will I work? Even then there were farmers who recruited students from as far away as Florida or Pennsylvania,” he said.
Adams said that today, the high school population seems far less interested in farm work. This has forced farmers, through the U.S. government, to find workers from places like Jamaica. “Wages today for workers under the H2A program are paid an hourly wage of $17.80 an hour in Connecticut. A New York Times article reported in the mid-1990s that the cost to raise one acre of shade tobacco was $30,000. I’m sure that it is much higher today.”
He said anti-smoking campaigns and the cigarette industry have had an impact on the cigar industry. “I really believe that the difficulty in recruiting workers was an issue that farmers have had to deal with for years and it had a major impact. Another issue was competition from other countries,” said Adams, who lives in Bloomfield, Connecticut.
For his presentation, Adams will bring a number of props, including stone tools used by the Native Americans and tobacco seeds to show the way plants are grown today versus how the plants were grown prior to the 1960s. The presentation starts at 2 p.m. The Smith House is located at 251 N. West St. in Feeding Hills.
