Museum, Curator Keep State's Tobacco History Alive

Source from:  By GAIL BRACCIDIFERRO Special to The Courant June 11, 2008  06/12/2008

Countless jokers have asked Marion Nielsen whether she sells cigars. Wide-eyed children have wondered aloud whether the museum Nielsen curates is about smoking. To the first group, she might politely smile and set them straight with an emphatic "no." To the second, she just as politely will tell them what quickly points out to any visitor to the Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum that the museum is about history - and for more than 200 years the region's history has been inextricably intertwined with the tobacco crop. "The purpose of the museum is to preserve the history of Tobacco Valley," Nielsen told a visitor recently before beginning a 45-minute tour. In the early 1800s, farmers along the Connecticut River from Portland north to Vermont began growing tobacco. At the peak of production in the first half of the 1900s, some 35,000 acres of valley land was planted in tobacco. In more recent years, people flying in and out of what's now Bradley International Airport would frequently comment on the expanses of fields covered in the white mesh tents needed to grow shade tobacco, Nielsen said. Development pressures, technological changes in the industry and the general decline in smoking have greatly diminished the number of local tobacco farms. Since the museum opened in 1992, however, the history of the farms and those who owned and worked them has been preserved in the museum's collection of books, documents, agricultural tools, black and white photographs and newspaper clippings. Nielsen said she has worked as curator of the museum since it opened. In that time, she's learned as much as possible about cultivating and harvesting tobacco, the local families who grew it, the workers who toiled in the fields and the process of turning Connecticut shade tobacco leaves into cigar wrappers. About 500 people, including groups of senior citizens and families who stroll through while attending a picnic at Northwest Park, where the museum is located, visit annually. "They come in from all over," Nielsen said. "Some days I could have no one come in and then on other days, I'll give three tours back to back." Many who visit have some connection to the tobacco industry, as did one middle-aged man who took a few minutes on a recent Saturday afternoon to look at some of the planting and harvesting implements in the red-painted original tobacco curing shed that now is one of two buildings that make up the museum. Before rushing off into the park, he paused to tell Nielsen he had been among the thousands of local teenagers who once worked through steamy summers in the tobacco fields. "They used to have buses that would go around and pick up kids all around the state to come and work in the fields," she said. Some of those former teen laborers who visit the museum will recall the days as happy ones, filled with chatter and laughter among peers, while others talk about the exhausting heat and back-breaking labor, she said. "The harvest is the hardest time," she said. "It's in July and August. The plants are wet and sticky and it's 10 to 20 degrees hotter in the tents." Nielsen said one visitor pointed to his father's photograph featured in a book about Jamaican migrant workers that is part of the museum's collection. Another researcher searching through the museum's collection of workers' time cards dating as far back as 1915 commented that many of the workers' names matched those of contemporary local families. A fair number of people who come through the museum's doors are carrying items they would like to donate. People have come with scrapbooks, dollhouse furniture fashioned out of cigar boxes, 1950s Tobacco Festival programs, amateur paintings of tobacco shed-dotted landscapes or migrant workers, tobacco sorting trays and other implements, books and photographs. "Everything in here's been donated to us," Nielsen said. The museum is named for John E. Luddy, who sold shade cloth to tobacco farmers, and Gordon Taylor, who ran the local agricultural experiment station and worked closely with the farmers, Nielsen said. Luddy set up a trust fund to benefit the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society that oversees the museum. Both men are now dead. While giving tours and undertaking the office and administrative work necessary to keep the small museum operating has become routine for Nielsen, there still are surprises. Inside the charcoal-scented, dusky tobacco shed full of farming equipment, Nielsen recalled the day an unexpected gust of wind blew the shed door shut and temporarily locked her and visitors inside. Luckily, a museum guest had a cellphone on which she called a park employee, who came to their rescue. Enditem