The Traprock Landscapes of New England. Peter M. LeTourneau
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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 based on paintings by the renowned nineteenth-century artist George H. Durrie of New Haven. Inside cover: West Rock and Westville.
Side panel: Judge’s Cave on West Rock. Images: author’s collection.
Because of the difficulties presented by their challenging terrain, the traprock hills did not participate in the early agricultural productivity of the alluvial intervales or the glacial drumlins and remained marginal hinterlands of limited value. The steep slopes and thin, stony soils of the traprock highlands allowed only marginal grazing, and the dry montane forests were extremely slow to recover from cutting. Echoing the general opinion about the traprock highlands in their 1704 report to the Connecticut Colony, surveyors Thomas Hart and Caleb Stanley found Mount Higby “almost wholly consisting of steep rocky hills, and very stony land, we judge … to be very mean, and of little value.”2
The Eli Whitney Museum, Whitneyville, Connecticut. Taking advantage of the waterpower available at the traprock ledges between East Rock and Mill Rock north of New Haven in 1798, Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, revolutionized American manufacturing by using interchangeable parts to produce firearms and other metal goods. Local traprock was used to build many structures, including the coal shed seen here, through Ithiel Town’s innovative lattice-truss bridge. An icon of the New England landscape, Town’s modular design was an efficient and cost-saving solution for crossing the numerous streams and rivers in the region.
View of Hartford from Talcott Mountain near Farmington, Connecticut. An economic powerhouse founded on finance, precision manufacturing, and tobacco, Hartford long boasted the highest per capita income in the United States. Referring to its opulent homes, magnificent civic architecture, and shady, elm tree–lined streets, Hartford resident Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, stated, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief…. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”
Lyman