From the Woodland Period through the early years of European contact, the alluvial terraces bordering the Connecticut River and its major tributaries supported substantial Native American villages with a nutritious triumvirate of corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by fish and game from adjacent waters and forests. The Dutch explorer and trader Adriaen Block was the first European to explore the Connecticut Valley by mapping the Red Hills (Rodenbergh) region near New Haven and sailing up what he called the Versche, or “Fresh,” River as far as the Enfield rapids in 1614. Attracted by the abundance of beaver, muskrat, and other furs, Dutch traders established Huys van Hoop (the House of Hope), a profitable but short-lived outpost at present-day Hartford, to process pelts arriving from the interior hinterlands. More interested in furs than farming, and facing the inevitable decline of an economy based on the reproductive rates of small mammals, as well as rapidly increasing numbers of English settlers who began arriving in the early 1630s, the Dutch began ceding their interest in the Connecticut Valley by the mid-1600s.
Lured to the Connecticut Valley by reports of arable lands bordering the Connecticut River and hopes of cutting into the Dutch fur trade, the English established the earliest permanent settlements in the region at Windsor (1633), Wethersfield (1634), Agawam (1635), Hartford (1635–37), and Springfield (1636), followed by Farmington (1640), Longmeadow (1644), Middletown (1651), Northampton (1653), and Deerfield (1673). According to the noted landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the productive soils, ample precipitation, and long growing season of the Connecticut Valley provided the English with “the first reassuring glimpse of the rich New World they had dreamt of, but had failed to find on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.”1
Setting the benchmark for agricultural productivity in New England, the Connecticut River “intervales” were widely sown with wheat and rye in the early years. In his exhaustive history of New England farming, A Long Deep Furrow (1982), Howard Russell rightly called the Connecticut Valley “the continent’s first wheat belt … the … breadbasket of New England: first the area around Hartford, then the middle section” (that is, from Northampton to Springfield). Production of wheat on the Connecticut River intervales was so successful that the Pynchon family, among the first settlers of Springfield, shipped around 1,500 to 2,000 bushels of the valuable grain to Boston each year, beginning in the late 1660s. Wheat from the northern Connecticut Valley also relieved a severe famine in Virginia in 1674. After a series of wheat rust blights, the farmers realized that the warm humid lowlands were more favorable for corn and hay, crops that came to dominate the central and northern Connecticut Valley.
The Connecticut Valley and the Connecticut River Valley are separate, but overlapping, geographic regions. After flowing through the Connecticut Valley for more than seventy miles, the Connecticut River exits the central lowland at Middletown, Connecticut.
Today, with sprawling housing developments and commercial strips dominating the landscape, it is hard to picture the vast amount of land under cultivation by the early nineteenth century. Referring to the Connecticut Valley in 1810, the New England geographers Jedidiah Morse and Elijah Parish declared: “The most important production of New England is grass. This not only adorns the face of the country, with a beauty unrivaled in the new world, but also furnishes more wealth and property to its inhabitants, than any other kind of vegetation. A farm of two hundred acres of the best grazing land, is worth, to the occupier, as much as a farm of three hundred acres of the best tillage land.”
Cresting a traprock ridge near Rocky Hill south of Hartford in 1833, British travel writer Edward T. Coke was impressed by the “magnificent view of … the light yellow corn fields covering the whole extent of the valley to a range of forest covered hills 20 miles distant.” Nearby Wethersfield, one of the oldest of the “river towns,” produced such prodigious crops of red onions in the sandy alluvial soil that travelers in the early 1800s noted that they could detect the pungent vegetable aroma far outside the village bounds.
The agricultural success of the river towns of the Connecticut Valley was soon joined by remarkable progress in craftsmanship and early manufacturing, the establishment of important academic and political institutions, as well as the founding of vibrant centers of national and international trade and commerce in New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield. By the early 1800s, the Connecticut Valley was firmly established as the model of American productivity, wealth, and ingenuity—factors, along with the scenic volcanic landscapes, that would elevate the region to national prominence, and make it one of the foremost destinations for landscape tourism into the early twentieth century.
The “river towns” of the Connecticut Valley, including Wethersfield (1634), are among the earliest permanent English settlements in New England. One of the oldest gravestones in Connecticut, dated 1648, belongs to Leonard Chester, an original settler of the town. He was allegedly lost for several days in the traprock hills, where he was beset by snakes and a fiery dragon, ordeals that gave rise to the geographic name Mount Lamentation. Image: author.
For cigar aficionados and agricultural historians, the Connecticut Valley is inseparable from fine shade-grown and broadleaf tobacco. Once noted for exceptionally high yields of hay and grain, by the late 1800s high-quality tobacco, mainly used for cigar wrappers, became the hallmark of Connecticut Valley agriculture in the region from Deerfield to Hartford. To simulate the very warm, humid, and cloudy climate of exotic tropical locations like Sumatra, Cuba, or Honduras, Connecticut Valley growers adopted the unique method of growing tobacco under large fabric enclosures. The tobacco “tents” also protected the large, but easily damaged, leaves from drying winds, harsh sunlight, and the deleterious effects of frequent summer thunderstorms. Long a premier variety, both shade-grown Connecticut Valley tobacco, and carefully tended sun-grown broadleaf, continue to command high prices as the preferred wrapper for the finest cigars. Although many tobacco fields were lost to housing developments, office parks, and commercial strips in the latter half of the twentieth century, the cultivation of tobacco remains an important part of the northern Connecticut Valley economy and an agricultural practice of historical significance.
The fertile alluvial terraces, or “intervales,” bordering the Connecticut River fostered some of the earliest permanent settlements in southern New England. View from Mount Holyoke.
While hay, corn, and tobacco reigned supreme in the northern Connecticut Valley, fruit orchards and dairy farms came to dominate the region south of Hartford. There, broad, streamlined glacial hills called drumlins proved ideal for apples and other native fruits because of their well-drained soils, favorable solar exposure, and a reduced chance of damaging late frosts in comparison to the colder surrounding valleys. Beginning in the 1700s, many family-owned orchards were established on the higher terrain adjacent to the traprock ridges, including Lyman Orchards in Middlefield (1741); Norton Brothers (1750s) and Drazen (early 1800s), both in Cheshire; Rogers in Southington (1809); Bishop’s (1871) in Guilford and near Totoket Ridge in North Branford; Blue Hills Orchards (1904) on the northern flank of Sleeping Giant ridge in Wallingford; and High Hill Orchards (early 1900s) in East Meriden near Beseck Mountain.
Similarly, dairy farmers found the well-drained drumlin hills better for grazing cows and growing hay than either the marshy alluvial lowlands or the stony traprock ridges. Today, only a few working dairy farms remain, but through the early twentieth century dozens of milk producers prospered on the glacial hills of the central and southern Connecticut Valley.
Tobacco has been a vital part of the agricultural history and culture of the Connecticut Valley since the 1700s. Early mid-twentieth-century cigar box with illustrations
