King’s Connecticut ties
Eighty years ago, 15-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. worked at a tobacco farm in Simsbury
Eighty years ago, a 15-year-old from Atlanta spent his summer working at a tobacco farm in Simsbury. The teenager was Martin Luther King Jr., a then-incoming freshman at Morehouse College in Georgia, who graduated high school early and secured the summer job to earn some money for school, he wrote in his autobiography. The Civil Rights leader’s connection to the 285-protectedacre property, called Meadowood, is largely why the town and other stakeholders are working to preserve the land and the remaining tobacco sheds today, in hopes of granting it a spot on the Connecticut Freedom Trail and National Register of Historic Places.
“(The tobacco sheds) are eligible for their association with Martin Luther King Jr. and other students from Morehouse who became Civil Rights leaders (and) who were there working in tobacco fields that period,” Todd Levine, an architectural historian for the State of Connecticut, said.
The Town of Simsbury, the Connecticut Historic Preservation Office and Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit dedicated to preserving public spaces, are part of a coalition working to turn the sheds into an outdoor exhibit and stabilize them for public viewing, a project Levine says is still in the planning stages.
It is one of the multiple initiatives people in Connecticut have undertaken to commemorate King’s tie to Simsbury. Others include Simsbury’s annual MLK Day celebration and Simsbury High School students’ efforts to create a memorial in front of the Simsbury Free Library, which was unveiled in 2021.
“It brings a lot of pride to Simsbury to even have a small connection to an iconic person like Martin Luther King,” Tara Willerup, executive managing director of the Simsbury Free Library, said.
In the summer of 1944, after completing his junior year of high school, King worked at a farm owned by Connecticut tobacco growers, Cullman Brothers, Inc., and returned for the same job in 1947.
King led Sunday church services in the dorms and they would attend First Church of Christ, according to Martin Luther King Jr. in Connecticut (MLK in CT), a committee made up of current Simsbury High School students.
While Connecticut was not immune to segregation, King was surprised by the lack of racial discrimination in the
North, compared to his home in the Jim Crow-era South. King wrote about his newlyexperienced freedoms in his letters to his family posted by The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
“I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we [ strikeout illegible] ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford. And we went to the largest shows there,” he wrote in a letter to his mother, Alberta Williams King, on June 18, 1944.
The summer of 1944 proved to be pivotal for King.
He later wrote in his autobiography that following his time in Connecticut, he had “a bitter feeling going back to segregation.”
“It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta,” he wrote. “The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”
That first summer in Connecticut inspired him to become a minister. In his application for the Crozer Theological Seminary School, he wrote that his decision to pursue ministry was cemented in the summer of 1944, when he “felt an inescapable urge to serve society,” a feeling that would lead him to fight for equal rights in America.
“In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape,” he wrote on his application.
Meadowood in Simsbury
For decades, the story about King’s Connecticut tie was largely unknown to most residents, Levine said.
In 2010, a group of Simsbury
High School students created a documentary detailing King’s time in Simsbury, supported by the Simsbury Free Library.
The final product was recognized by national news outlets, and the students later formed the MLK in CT committee to raise funds for a memorial in front of the Simsbury Free Library. Throughout the project, she observed the students relating to King as a teenager and feeling empowered by his story. King was around the high schoolers’ age when he was called to service in Connecticut.
“I think that’s really the message that (the students) want the documentary to send, that they want the memorial to send and that each of these kids really takes with them: ‘How can I make a difference?’ And many of them have,” Willerup said.
Catherine Labadia, Connecticut’s deputy state historic preservation officer and staff archeologist, received a grant from the National Park Service in 2016 to study Meadowood, Levine confirmed, and in 2019, she began working with Trust for Public Land to purchase the land, which was set to be cleared for a 300-home subdivision.
In 2021, using funds from the state and Town of Simsbury, Trust for Public Land purchased the property from Indus Realty Trust Inc. for $6 million and conveyed it to the Town of Simsbury, Walker Holmes, the Connecticut state director for the organization, said in an email. The sale required $2.5 million from the Town of Simsbury, which was approved by residents after they petitioned to have the Meadowood purchase on the ballot, according to the Town
of Simsbury.
The organization, town and state are working with residents to create a plan for the sheds, trails and other features of Meadowood, Holmes said. They could finish the plan by the summer earliest, she said, and there isn’t an estimated completion date for the project.
The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development allocated $300,000 through its Good to Great Grant program to preserve the tobacco sheds and stabilize them, Levine said. The state and Trust for Public Land are also working on an outdoor exhibit that will display letters King wrote to his family in the summers of 1944 and ‘47, he said.
Levine hopes to open the exhibit and finish the sheds in 2025.
Long-term plans for the site include adding it to the Connecticut Freedom Trail, which features over 160 sites highlighting the accomplishments of Black Americans, and nominating it for a spot in the National Register of Historic Places to the National Park Service.
Three percent of sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places focus on Black American history, according to Trust for Public Land.
“This collective oversight deprives all Americans of a full understanding of the history of our nation,” the Trust for Public Land website reads.
Simsbury’s MLK memorial
The MLK in CT committee’s fundraising efforts culminated in 2021, when the MLK memorial was unveiled in front of the Simsbury Free Library.
The site features five glass
panels with that display text chronicling King’s time in Simsbury and its impact. The exit markers on the memorial face north and south to depict King’s journey from the southern to northern U.S. and they are made out of brownstone, native to Connecticut, according to the MLK in CT website. The committee is currently raising funds for a bench at the site made out of granite from Georgia, King’s home state, according to the website.
“There are a lot of fun pieces that we’re trying to connect with the mission of being in service to each other, being kind to each other, making a difference in the world (and) building character,” Willerup said.
The students also work with the MLK Day in Simsbury committee every year to host a celebration on the January holiday, featuring a keynote speaker and the Gertrude Banks Gospel choir, Willerup said.
Paris Albrecht, a senior at Simsbury High School and co-president of MLK in CT, said the committee is planning on hosting field trips for the local schools that will feature programs related to King.
Albrecht said she joined MLK in CT to learn about King’s history, as well as help carry on his legacy of combating inequality in Simsbury and beyond.
“While we still have a lot of progress to go in terms of dismantling systemic racism, it’s my hope that MLK in CT Committee will be a part of that process, using MLK’s time in Simsbury as a bridge between our town’s history and how we can keep moving in the right direction today,” she said in an email.