Museum of Connecticut History

At the Museum of Connecticut history I believe that I will learn about the wars Connecticut has contributed to and what weapons were used in each of these wars.

Also I believe that I will learn about important figures in Connecticut history that made large decisions and could have altered Connecticut’s historical timeline. Being a Connecticut resident, I expect that there will be a section devoted dedicated to the Navy in the submarines that have been built in Groton

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How did Connecticut contribute to the United States’s wars?

How were these weapons used?

 

There were many photographs and lots of text written about important figures in Connecticut’s history such as Ella T. Grasso, a Connecticut politician who graduated from Loomis Chaffee. While looking around the museum, I found many old guns with interesting backgrounds such as the Model MIA2 Fixed Anti-Aircraft Cannon, manufactured by a Connecticut manufacturing company called Colt’s. This weapon was sold most during World War II and sales pitch in 1943. Call sold to the American government and the American government used its foreign policies in war with this weapon. The Allied forces were able to take over control from the Germans using this weapon. Another fastening display was the model of the USS Connecticut. USS Connecticut was active during WWI but did not go to battle. This model of a naval battleship was the only naval display in all of the museum. I was expecting to learn about when the Groton naval base became actively making submarines, how many submarines they made, and where they were deployed. As a Connecticut resident, I know a lot about Connecticut’s naval history, but I felt that our naval history was not fairly represented. Why were there not exhibits focused on the building of submarines at the Groton Navel Base? What involvement have these submarines had in foreign affairs, ie. wars?

 

Tobacco Museum

Artifacts in the tobacco museum date back to the early 1800s and informs us on the process of making cigars for people to smoke. This this museum consisted of two buildings, one being an old tobacco shed and the other, inside. The old tobacco shed is filled with tools and machinery used out in the tobacco fields, has different varieties of tobacco seeds, and some hanging dried tobacco. Inside were videos describing the process in depth and also many different wooden cigar boxes. This is it conveys the hard work and economical opportunity here in the first Town of Connecticut. Windsor would not be the place it is today if tobacco farms never existed and if the Connecticut Valley tobacco historical society was not formed to preserve artifacts used in this process, people would not understand how Windsor came to be. The tobacco industry was very profitable made many men very wealthy back in the day. Connecticut Valley cigars were of some of the highest grade, top quality cigars made in the country. There was a very diverse group of people that worked for these farms. Mainly males worked out in the fields and mainly females worked rolling and packing tobacco. Shade tobacco, the tobacco used for the outside of cigars, can only be grown in the Connecticut River Valley and not any were else in the the entire United States. People working on these tobacco farms were not having fun, they working for their families or freedom so that they could do something better with the money they saved, something they wanted to do. While the industry was through the 1940s, a combination of researchers publishing a report on the correlation between cancer and tobacco  and cigarets becoming more popular than cigars led to the decline the cigar industry. I believe that there should have been a section of the museum talking about the affects of tobacco.

Sources: Windsor Historical society, http://windsorhistoricalsociety.org/tobacco-windsors-cash-crop/