Sunderland, Massachusetts

Sunderland, Massachusetts was settled in seventeen thirteen and incorporated in seventeen eighteen as a farming town on the flat bottomlands between the Connecticut River and the base of Mount Sugarloaf. The land is some of the richest alluvial soil in New England, laid down by ancient Lake Hitchcock, a glacial lake that once flooded the entire Connecticut Valley to a depth of hundreds of feet. When the glacial dam broke roughly twelve thousand years ago, the lake drained and left behind a valley floor of fine-grained silt that has grown tobacco, onions, asparagus, and sweet corn for three centuries.

Sunderland today is one of the last towns in the Pioneer Valley where large-scale vegetable and shade-grown tobacco farming survives. The red barns and tobacco drying sheds visible from the road are a working remnant of an agricultural tradition that once supplied the entire Connecticut River valley with its harvest.