The Land Itself, Glaciers, Traprock, and the Connecticut River

To understand Connecticut, it helps to start eighteen thousand years ago, when a sheet of glacial ice more than a mile thick covered every ridge and valley in what is now the state. When the ice retreated, it left behind a landscape of uncommon complexity in a small space: erratic boulders dropped at random on hillsides, kettle ponds pooled in depressions where chunks of ice had melted, and a thin, rocky soil over ancient bedrock that made farming hard but made rivers run fast. The Connecticut River, the longest river in New England, drains a watershed that stretches from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound, cutting through the center of the state in a broad valley floored with rich glacial lacustrine soils, some of the best farmland in southern New England, deposited by the lake that formed when the retreating glacier dammed the valley.

That valley tobacco, the broadleaf variety grown in the Connecticut River towns of Windsor and Simsbury and Suffield, became famous as wrapper leaf for premium cigars. For nearly two centuries, tobacco sheds with their distinctive hinged venting boards dotted the valley. They are rarer now, but some remain.

Running parallel to the river valley, the Metacomet Ridge, a line of volcanic traprock ridges formed by ancient lava flows, stretches the full length of the state from the Massachusetts border to Long Island Sound near New Haven. The ridge creates dramatic angular cliff faces above the softer Connecticut lowlands: Sleeping Giant, Talcott Mountain, East Rock, West Rock. These cliffs appear in the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School.

They appear in the backgrounds of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, who painted the Connecticut River Valley in the eighteen forties and fifties and called it, without irony, the American Eden. The geology is the story. Rocky soil forced Connecticut toward manufacturing when farming did not pay.

Fast rivers powered the mills. The valley soils grew the tobacco that wrapped the Havana cigars of the Gilded Age. The traprock ridges gave the state its dramatic skyline and its town parks.

The glacier made Connecticut what it is.