While the hand rolling of cigars moved offshore long ago, the labor-intensive practice of growing Connecticut-shade wrapper prevails at The Brown Farm, one of Connecticut's pioneer producers of the region's famed cigar leaf.

When members of Stanton Brown's extended clan sit down around the dinner table and reminisce about the family's Windsor, Conn. farm where tobacco has been grown since 1874, a story is often retold about his father Hubbell's success - or more accurately, his failure - growing one of the first local crops of what became known as Connecticut shade tobacco.

The year was 1938 and Hubbell had become interested in the new technique developed by the nearby Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Meticulously, Hubbell and his workers followed the agronimist's instructions and planted a strain of Cuban-seed tobacco beneath a gauze covering. Throughout the summer Brown and his workers carefully nurtured the crop. What they found at harvest was a plant that had produced very delicate, thinly veined leaves - perfect for wrapping cigars.

Pleased, Hubbell Brown stored the tobacco in a curing shed, intending to sell the leaf as soon as it dried. The experiment ended ignominiously when a mid-September storm known variously as The Great Hurricane of 1938 and the Long Island Express - hurricanes weren't given human names in those days - swept into New England with winds gusting greater than 180 mph.

"Grandfather lost the shed and all the tobacco in it," recalls Kathy Brown Martin. "He had to start over that next year. He was very frustrated."

Cigar smokers everywhere are glad that Hubbell Brown and other Connecticut Valley farmers persevered. Connecticut shade wrapper is among the most highly prized tobacco in the world. Significantly, for various reasons, attempts to duplicate the Connecticut shade leaf characteristics elsewhere have mostly failed.

"Basically," says Stanton Brown, Kathy Martin's father and president of H.F. Brown Inc., "our climate, the soil, the nice long days and cool nights and the experience we have growing the tobacco pay off. This valley produces excellent tobacco that is impossible to duplicate anywhere else in the world."

With 160 acres of Connecticut shade tobacco planted last summer, the Brown Farm has bucked a five-decade trend by producing more Connecticut shade tobacco today than at any other time in the past. The heyday for shade-grown tobacco was in the 1940s and 1950s when Connecticut Valley farmers planted more than 20,000 acres each year. Today, Brown estimates that only a couple of thousand acres are planted. "We've seen a lot of land disappear to housing projects, highways and other industries," Brown laments. "The Connecticut Valley has lost a lot of good tobacco land to development."

Brown has increased his acreage dedicated to Connecticut shade by 10 percent each of the last three years. With the demand for cigars waning, he doesn't expect to add acreage in 2000. "We are leveling off," he says. "We are basically small acres compared to the farms in the Midwest. And we have a specialized crop."

The renowned Connecticut Valley roughly extends from near Dearfield, Mass., and follows the Connecticut River south to Middletown, Conn.

The Brown Farm is a member of the Windsor Shade Coop with eight other area farms. The coop ships cured tobacco to the Dominican Republic, where it is sorted into 26 grades, based on size, color, and quality, and sold to major manufactures in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Central America. Coop customers include Tabacalera A. Fuente y cia, Congrar International, Consolidated Cigar Co., Tabacalera de Garcia, Seita S.A., and Matasa S.A., among others.

Besides tobacco that will be sold to cigar manufacturers, the Brown Farm annually grows about 70 small plots of experimental tobacco varieties in an attempt to increase yield and to breed characteristics that are resistant to blue mold and nemotodes in the crop.

Blue mold, which mottles the tobacco leaf making it virtually useless as wrapper, struck the Connecticut Valley in both 1997 and 1998, reducing the area's crop by more than 10 percent.

"You do cross breeding and re-crosses and find out what's doing well and what isn't," Martin says. "Of the main varieties, there are six or eight that we like."

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