The East Coast Greenway’s Farmington Canal Heritage Trail runs past the Cullman Brothers tobacco barns in Simsbury, Connecticut. Civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. spent two summers working here as a young man in the 1940s. Like many African American youth from the South, King came to work in Connecticut’s fields to earn money forschool and his family.
Connecticut Humanities’ website notes that “King’s letters home to his mother and father reveal [his] astonishment at the prospects open to African Americans in the comparatively less restrictive North. He wrote of worshiping alongside white people in a Simsbury church and of dining in Hartford. ‘I never though[t] that a person of my race could eat anywhere,’ he wrote, ‘but we…ate in one of the finest restaurant[s]….’ The state was not free of racism, of course, but the lack of overt segregation, such as King experienced in the South, made a lasting impression.”
In September 2021, the Trust for Public Land and the Town of Simsbury announced the protection of the Meadowood farm as a historic and culturally significant swath of land. The 285-acre property looks about the same as it did more than 75 years ago, offering important connections to Connecticut’s civil rights history.
This text comes from "Guide to the East Coast Greenway: New Haven, Connecticut, to Providence, Rhode Island, By Bike or On Foot" by Lisa Watts, an East Coast Greenway Alliance publication with support from Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and The 1772 Foundation. The second edition of the publication will be available soon.
