Connecticut Valley Vernacular
Subtitle: The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco Fields
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: July 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780812236705
Subjects: Architecture; History; Photography & Photographs; Landscape; Tobacco curing; United States - State & Local - General; USA; U.S. Architecture - General; History - General; Architecture / Historic Preservation; Connecticut River Valley; Social life and customs; Tobacco; Vernacular architecture
First sentence: The Connecticut River rises in a series of lakes near the Canadian border in northern Hampshire, falls some 1,600 feet in the course of its more than four-hundred-mile journey, and empties into Long Island Sound between Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, Connecticut, having drained more than 13,000 square miles.
Description: "James F. O'Gorman reads through oral histories, newspaper reports, and the terse factual writing of agricultural diaries to bring to life the risks and rewards of living close to the seasons, at the mercy of rainfall and sunshine. He has collected an array of vintage and newly commissioned photos of the work of growing tobacco, from de facto portraits of anonymous laborers to images of the sheds themselves, with all their ventilating doors open, welcoming the air.

In this book, O'Gorman treats both the people and the sheds with the respect and admiration their precarious presence requires."--BOOK JACKET.