In the late 19th and early 20th centuries large numbers of Eastern European immigrants came to the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts, lured by its agricultural opportunities. In 1913, photographers Frances and Mary Allen photographed these immigrant women and a child harvesting onions in Deerfield.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Eastern European immigrants flocked to the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts lured by its agricultural opportunities. Farmers relied on “Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks” for labor. In 1900, Massachusetts onion production ranked fifth in the country and many Eastern Europeans worked in these fields. The work was labor-intensive and involved cultivating, weeding, and topping. Workers were often on their hands and knees. One woman recalls, when she was a child in the 1940s, searching for snakes in her grandparents’ fields and crawling along the rows to trim onion tops with scissors. Thrips, caused by growing “seed” onions close to fields of “sets,” infested fields. In the 1940s, DDT (a cancer-causing pesticide) was used on area farms. Eventually, competition with large-scale farms further west caused a decline in Massachusetts onion production.
The soil in the Connecticut River Valley, from Wethersfield, Connecticut, to Hadley, Massachusetts, was well suited to the cultivation of onions and the available workforce of Eastern European immigrants in the late 19th century made for heavy production of this root crop.
he flat meadows of the Connecticut River Valley were formed from glacial deposits from Lake Hitchcock. Free of rocks, the rich top soil is 15 feet deep with a mixture of sand, silt, and clay that makes it ideal to grow crops, especially onions, tobacco, and potatoes. “Hadley loam” is less prone to erosion. “It’s dream soil for a farmer .”
