CT Tobacco Barns

Connecticut does have a Tobacco industry. It is just a sliver of what it used to be, though. Most of it is "shade tobacco" protected by net screens looking like so many square miles of spider web supported by scaffolding to make a sort of a greenhouse effect during critical times of the plant growth. This produces good tobacco for wrapping cigars, I am told. Local people my age remember having summer jobs in the tobacco fields, helping migrant and local workers with planting, screening, or hanging harvested leaves up to dry in the classic tobacco barns.

Well, the barns are my real interest. A Connecticut staple of country landscape are these large and blocky barns, with their weathered red, brown or silvery sides. They almost are invisible because of being so commonplace. You see old ones over-run by vegetation, roof caved in and boards stripped for somebody's rec room. You see them turned into all sorts of storage buildings, but mostly they stay in their unique original form. The planking on the sides is articulated so that every other board can open to vent, and so they are not air tight structures at all, as barns go. Sort of an imaginary architectural vision comes to me with one of these barns to live in, the outside being rustic and original, then the inside maybe a ultra modern house. The contrast would be stunning.

To illustrate, from my "vast archives" I draw these pictures Martha and I took(except the shade pic) over in South Windsor, down by the Connecticut River a couple of summers ago.