shed, or any other barn. During this season, the sheds’ vents are open to cure tobacco. There are a variety of ways to construct vents: vertical slats, horizontal slats, side vents, end vents, bottom vents, roof vents, trapdoor vents, and small and large door openings. There are as many venting methods as there are opinions about which one is superior. Each farmer has a favorite. Driving up and down both sides of the Connecticut River fueled our desire to cover every square mile of the Connecticut River Valley looking for tobacco sheds. We found two sheds in Vermont that gave us a starting point for our second book about them, Vanishing Treasures. Unfortunately, we did not find a single tobacco shed remaining in New Hampshire. The telltale hardware for different venting configurations is how we differentiated tobacco sheds from other old sheds and barns. The first few towns across the Massachusetts border—Northfield, Greenfield, and Deerfield—yielded a few sheds, but these were mostly used for storage. As we traveled farther south, we found the number of sheds and the amount of tobacco being cultivated are at their greatest in Amherst and Hadley, Massachusetts, where tobacco farmer David Mokrezki has counted at least ninety-two sheds in the small triangle between Cumins Road, Stockbridge Road, and Meadow Street. In northwestern Connecticut on both the east and west sides of the river, tobacco sheds are in abundance even This Suffield, Connecticut, shed is filled to the rafters with drying broadleaf tobacco. BELOW LEFT Once used by the Thrall Farm in Windsor, Connecticut, these five sheds on Day Hill Road now stand abandoned. BELOW RIGHT The broadleaf tobacco in this Enfield, Connecticut, shed is in the process of being unloaded. ABOVE
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Historic New England Summer 2015
within ten miles of the capital city of Hartford. While no sheds remain in the city, just south of Hartford they return to the landscape in Glastonbury and Portland, the southern tip of the Tobacco Valley. Although not every town along the river has a large number of standing tobacco sheds, we were usually able to find a few. We are often asked what can be done to raise awareness and appreciation of these and other historic agricultural buildings. Thomas Visser, professor and director of the University of Vermont’s Historic Preservation Program, said it best in the foreword of Vanishing Treasures: Certainly one of the most effective first steps to accomplish this task is to document representa-