Finding Floydsville, Ct. 9/14/14

So why would I want to find Floydville, Ct.? 

A lovely fall Sunday and cemetery visit to my own relatives in Suffield, Ct. turned into a serendipitous find. But the odd relatedness of it all makes random sometimes not feel that way at all.

Here's how the story unfolds: I recently learned that the reason my father's family had fallen off the genealogy chart for 1930 was because the census taker/recorder had put them under Edmunds vs. Edmonds. The family shows up in the 1920 census as Sam (27) and Magnolia Edmonds (21) with 2 children, 2.5 yr. old Anna (my godmother) and 8 mth. old Doris. They are renters on 21 West Suffield Rd. and Sam's occupation is listed as "farm laborer." The listing also tells of the neighbors also renting on West Suffield Road and the first 15 names are all from Poland, then the 4 negro's from Virginia/Edmonds,  and finally, curiously, 4 other Negros with the family name Davis from Maryland (they coincidentally are a 37 yr. old mom w/ 3 children and no occupation). Most of the occupations of these 1920 West Suffield renters are either Tobacco Warehouses or Tobacco Sizers. 

I would so love to have just 5 minutes (I lie, I would be greedy and want at least a week) to gaze upon this scene of Polish immigrants and Southern negros all living and renting in the rural Northern Ct. countryside in 1920. What ever would it have looked, smelled, and felt like? 

And then warp 10 years. Lost in ephemera, but existing none-the-less, for I have dad's birth certificate and sure as shit the man was born on May 4, 1924 right there in Suffield, Ct. But they weren't in the census. They disappeared. "Well his brother James was 33, and a truck driver who lived on Russell Ave.," the person at the Hartford Historical Society told me (I was on another journey to visit the mansion that housed the society and for ha-ha's I stopped and asked). "But apparently Samuel moved away." "Nope, not true" I stubbornly retorted, "They were there." I was sort of reeling from the 1920 news that my father had a sister named Doris who also really, truly did disappear. Never a word had I heard about her. She was there in 1920 as an infant and gone in 1930 when we did finally find the family as Edmunds. What happened to her? How could she just disappear? The census had the family now moved to 98 Depot Street with a full compliment of 8 children, excepting when you compared the children of 1920 to 1930, there is 12 yr. old Anna, and then 8 yr. old Matilda, and on down. Doris should have been 10 and in the line up, but she was a gone girl. Talk about a mystery.

Samuel Edmonds et al. got misfiled, lost a daughter, and when we went to look for this 1930 census address in West Suffield, we sadly found that Depot St. did not exist anymore. Tobacco barely exists anymore in Suffield, and back in the day, well Tobacco was King! Since about the turn of the 19th century tobacco was the industry and in 1810 West Suffield boasted the 1st Cigar Factory in the U.S.  Just let this stat sit for a moment in your head: By 1924, there were 15,000 acres of tobacco being cultivated under shade in the Connecticut River Valley!  

In 1902 a railroad line was run from Tariffville (currently Simsbury, Ct.) to Feeding Hills, passing through West Suffield Center. This is the area that still has shade tobacco growing by small farms and also the area that the biking Farmington Rail Trail goes thru. This line was not the same as the 1844 Hartford-Springfield railroad line with its branch to Suffield that was completed in 1870. Also, Suffield had 2 canals, one on the Ct. river side, and the piece of the Farmington canal that went straight thru on up to my current location of Northampton, MA. But finding out information about West Suffield has proven to be quite the challenge. I dig a little deeper each time I go to the cemetery and feel stirrings of curiosity and connectedness.

Finding Floydville, although accidental, sort of provided a context for what I imagined of my own family, but just down the road a bit. 

This re-used station depot isn't even on a Depot Rd. It is on Hartford Ave. in East Granby, Ct.

This is what the East Granby Station originally looked like.

This partially shaded home is abandoned, although the cars that dot the property don't look that old. This is a slightly elevated road that runs parallel to the Rail Trail for a short (like only 3 houses on it) while. We learned that this street was named...Railroad St., how aprophos, right!?

I bet I know someone who could carbon date those Converses to an exact year and model!

My good ole Pet(er), rule-abiding citizen took distant shots.

Overgrown and in a state of decay is this once proud church.

Yes it looks like a ranch style house, or at least that it started as one and was converted.

It is just sitting on the side of the rail trail and one has to wonder, "why?" Why left to decay, why no explanation.

The windows had what appeared to be almost like those plastic decals, but with a church motif.

There was scripture stuff written on cardboard and propped against a wall inside.

Old boxspring mattress and luggage littering the yard

and something once proud, now a hazard and a mess. Such a sad shame.

So what is all this, what happened here? 

Took some digging but I eventually found out (or at least part of the story). It's here:

http://ctfreedomtrail.org/data/files/CFT%20Shade%20Tobacco%20updated(1).pdf

Thank you Dawn Byron Hutchins, Ct. area historian for providing great stuff for curious minds like myself. Rushia West's story is such an amazing one.

From Dawn's work on the tobacco industry in Ct. is gleened this:

And then Rushia West's story begins when her family came to Ct. from Americus Georgia in 1917. The church was called West Church and it was built by Rushia starting in 1955 to serve the tobacco workers in Floydville. The story ends, "By 1990 Rushia West had passed and along with her the memories of the community she built." What then happened is lost to me. No one cared? Tied up in litigation? All I know is what we stumbled upon almost 25 yrs. later. Rot and decay.

There was a house, there were cars, there were pleasure crafts (boats), and some looked fairly new. But all was just sitting there.
I wonder for how much longer?

Somebody's Couch

Then we came upon this house near the end of Railroad Street. I could hear children playing somewhere in the yard, and I soooo wanted to stop, knock, and ask. Alas, there are those things you just have to let go.

  

Tobacco sheds and a tractor sign near Floydville Rd. tells a story in and of itself

Even if the sheds have seen their day. Tobacco is still here, just not King anymore.

and then there are the next 2 pictures (which others have tracked + blogged about its decay) of the remains of the Floydville Plantation.

Hard to believe that up North there were "plantations," but there were and there is even a Plantation Dr. in Suffield, and Plantation Rd. in  Windsor as well. This term "plantation" was associated with the tobacco industry and this site was originally a part of the America Sumatra Tobacco Co. The area was + is known for growing "shade tobacco." Makes sense that some Southern blacks made their way North to these Ct. outfits as they came from tobacco-growing regions in the South. Some folks were recruited as was the way for many types of booming industries at the turn of the 20th century. Marcus Floyd was one of those recruiters, and thus Floydville Rd. and plantation came to be. Looks like soon though, it will be no more.

Some things I learned about shade tobacco:

• Ct. River Valley known for this type of growing as well as being used to wrap cigars.
• Relies heavily on migrant workers from South and Caribbean
• Famous folks have worked up here like Arthur Ashe, Mahalia Jackson, Hattie McDaniel and Thurgood Marshall
•  The Connecticut River Valley was immortalized in the 1961 film Parrish, which starred Troy Donahue as an ambitious young man trying to make a living working on a Connecticut-shade tobacco farm. An evil tobacco baron played by Karl Malden gets in his way.
• There is even a museum, The Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum in Windsor, Ct (that I hope to someday visit).

Couldn't find out what this brownfield site was. It is diagonally across from the failing plantation and directly across from Railroad St. Next door is some sort of tree farm on Lordship Rd. (who comes up with some of these street names?).

So we rode on thru to Simsbury, Ct and then returned to East Granby, Ct., having learned a little of what it must have been like to come North to work at the hard manual labor task of tobacco worker. I signed on to do just that as a teenager and was driven somewhere down here in Northern Ct. and guess what? I didn't even last one day in the horrid heat of the fields. I quit mid-morning, ate my lunch early, and sat for hours in the bus until the migrant tobacco workers day was done.