Simsbury Barns, and Part of MLK's Legacy, to Be Preserved

From King Nutmeg:

Here I am again, with more barns. Just call me Barn-y. Whenever I'm back in my Connecticut hometown (or near it), I make photos of these old tobacco sheds (see September 3, 2021, "Many Barns, Two Minds" and July 19, 2016, "Tobacco Road").

The two barns featured in the photos above and below are along Firetown Road in West Simsbury. I was in town recently for a golf tournament, and before visiting a friend's house, I took the opportunity to shoot these endangered beauties. Along with others in this area (along both County and Hoskins roads), this pair was owned for decades by Cullman Brothers (aka Culbro), a shade-tobacco grower and cigar manufacturer. Click the link above for my "Tobacco Road" post to learn more about the history of Tobacco Valley, a fertile area stretching from Springfield, Massachusetts, south along the Connecticut River and its tributaries to Hartford.

Nowadays, the barns and surrounding acreage, known as Meadowood, are owned by the Trust for Public Land, a California-based conservation nonprofit. Part of the attraction for the TPL, according to its web site, was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s connection to these lands.

"As a student at Atlanta’s Morehouse College...King Jr. joined a group of his fellow students who ventured north to work in these fields. In letters home during those summers, King described the liberating experience of getting out from under the Jim Crow laws of the segregated South," the web site states. "'I had never thought that any person of my race could eat anywhere, but we ate at one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,' he wrote to his mother. Today, just two percent of sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places focus on the experiences of Black Americans. This collective oversight deprives all Americans of a full understanding of the history of our nation. The Trust for Public Land is working across the nation to accelerate the preservation of sites, such as Meadowood, that tell the story of Black life in America."

"To preserve the history that remains — and ensure that future generations have a chance to explore it for themselves — The Trust for Public Land is part of a coalition, along with the State Historic Preservation Office, that had been working to protect the property from development and restore some of its historic barns," the group's web site continues. "Now that it is protected, Meadowood can be included in the Connecticut Freedom Trail, a network of sites associated with Black history across the state."

In addition to restoring some of the barns, the TPL "will also protect 117 acres of prime farmland, which can be made available to local farmers in perpetuity."

I look forward to following the progress of the restoration of these barns.