I grew up in Suffield in the 60s. There were four children in my family and all of us experienced working for the Christian family on their tobacco farms in the summer. There were many tobacco farms in Suffield then, both shade and broadleaf. The Christian family grew shade tobacco. If you were 14 years old, you could work on these farms. Boys worked in the fields picking the tobacco and girls worked in the tobacco barns sewing the leaves. The sewing machines we used had three person teams. One girl piled the leaves in front of the two girls using the machine. The laths, the leaves were sown to, came in bundles of fifty and we took turns sewing or piling leaves. It was hot, dirty work but you were with friends from school so you could talk and pass the time. You were paid by the hour or by the bundle depending on how your day was spent.
Our first job of the summer was tying up the tobacco plants to a wire just below the top of the white cloth net. This was an awful job as it was hot under the net. You had to bend down to get the string wrapped around the base of the plant then keeping the string tight and straight swing it over the wire and knot it, breaking the string with your little finger. You needed to prepare your fingers for this job by wrapping your fingers with white adhesive tape. I still have a small scar on my right little finger from cutting it with string doing this task. I probably didn’t wrap enough tape and thus the cut. The string had to be tight as this is what the tobacco leaves would grow along. A boss would walk along the row, test the strings for tightness and any too loose you had to do again. The boys were much faster at this. We never worked the same fields as the boys, but we would see them in neighboring fields and they always finished their field before us. Doing this stringing job we were paid by the hour. It was a relief once we started sewing the leaves. Most of the summer was spent sewing leaves. If it rained you didn’t work, and you might start later in the day after a rainstorm as wet leaves were never picked. As the weeks went by, the leaves went from medium size to huge by the time the picking season was almost over. The larger the leaf the heavier it was and the heavier the lath was once you sewed your leaves to it. Another job in the barn was carrying the full laths to farm workers who worked overhead placing the laths on beams in the barns to be cured. Carrying the laths was also a heavy job as the leaves got larger. The Christian family had multiple farms in Suffield and West Suffield. We worked in different barns all the time. I saw parts of Suffield I had never seen before.
It was hot, dirty work but you developed a sense of responsibility and accomplishment when a barn was full of hung tobacco ready to be cured. It was emphasized by the Christian family members, our supervisors, that each tobacco leaf was valuable and a resource not to be wasted. They provided transportation, morning and afternoon breaks, 30 minutes for lunch and treated all the kids respectfully. There were kids from both Windsor Locks and Suffield. Although Windsor Locks was our rival high school team, I don’t remember any hostility among the boys or girls. We were paid in cash weekly and that was probably what I remember most. We started work at 7a.m. and the day ended around 3 p.m. Then you were happy to go home, take a shower and rest before the next day of summer work. The Christian family hosted a yearly holiday dinner for all their employees in December at the VFW Hall on Sheldon Street. This was a thank you for everyone who worked for them. It was a dress up affair. It was interesting to see kids you recognized from the summer without a hat or hair scarf, or white tape on their fingers dressed up and enjoying a holiday dinner.
I think another positive from this summer experience was learning that you can do anything if you make it fun with your friends.