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

By the early decades of the twentieth century, southern New England's Connecticut Valley had become a center of shade tobacco production and a destination for seasonal farmworkers drawn from sources inside and outside of New England. This paper explores the history of three groups of seasonal workers—children from area cities and towns; white southern high school students; and young African American men from southern high schools and black colleges—with 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 to the historiography of twentieth-century New England farming by drawing attention to the largely overlooked story of non-rural and extra-regional seasonal farmworkers. My second goal is to frame the case of Connecticut tobacco labor according to the study of mobility and its relationship to landscape. The mobility of workers into and within the region, I suggest, made possible the success of the shade tobacco economy while at the same time posing challenges to popularized cultural conventions about regional identity. For this reason, I argue, the history of Connecticut's shade tobacco landscape was informed by the efforts of shade tobacco growers to direct and control a confluence of environmental conditions, group and place-based identities, and the mechanics and meanings of mobility among seasonal workers. By hiring non-local, seasonal workers and by attempting to control their mobility, large-scale, corporate growers and their spokespeople ultimately sought to maintain control over the development and identity of the valley's rural landscape.