Windsor Soil Series

The Windsor series is sandy from the surface all the way down. It formed from glacial meltwater deposits — sand and gravel carried by rivers flowing out of the melting ice sheet and spread across flat outwash plains in the Connecticut River Valley.

Because Windsor soil drains so fast, it dries out quickly after rain. Roots get plenty of air but not much stored water. That made it a poor choice for most New England crops — but an excellent choice for shade-grown broadleaf tobacco, which thrives in well-aerated, fast-draining sand.

Windsor soil has been proposed as Connecticut's official state soil by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and state soil scientists. The Connecticut Legislature has not yet passed it into law, making Windsor one of only two proposed-but-not-adopted state soils in the United States.

The Windsor series takes its name from Windsor, Connecticut, a Hartford County town on the Connecticut River where soil scientists first mapped and described this sandy outwash. Federal soil surveyors began mapping the Connecticut Valley tobacco lands in 1899 — one of the earliest agricultural soil surveys in New England — and the soils they described there became the foundation of the Windsor series.

Soil scientists nominated Windsor because it covers a significant part of the state's most historically productive agricultural land and because its connection to shade tobacco gives it a story that no other Connecticut soil can match.

Windsor soil has no clay-enriched subsoil — that sets it apart from most state soils in the Northeast. Every layer is sandy. If you dug into Windsor soil, you would find loose, light-colored sand within the first few inches and more sand all the way down. The color gets lighter as you go deeper.

Windsor soil covers about 34,000 acres in Connecticut, with the largest concentrations in the northern Connecticut River Valley. The soil sits on flat outwash plains and low terraces alongside the Connecticut River and its tributaries.

Some Windsor areas formed not from rivers but from sand dunes. When glacial Lake Hitchcock drained from the Connecticut Valley after the last ice age, the dry lake bed exposed fine sand to the wind. Those wind-blown deposits are mapped as Windsor soil today.

Windsor soil sits on top of sand and gravel aquifers that supply drinking water to towns across the Connecticut River Valley. The same fast drainage that suits tobacco also means that anything applied to the surface — fertilizer, pesticides, fuel — can reach groundwater quickly.

Windsor soil's main crop is shade-grown broadleaf tobacco. For most of the twentieth century, the Connecticut River Valley was the center of American cigar wrapper production, and Windsor soil was where most of that tobacco grew. Growers stretched white cheesecloth canopies over the fields to diffuse sunlight, producing large, thin leaves used to wrap premium cigars.

Tobacco still grows on Windsor soil today, though production is a fraction of its historical peak. Farmers also grow silage corn, hay, fruit, and vegetables where Windsor soil is not too droughty for irrigation.

Where land is not farmed or developed, Windsor soil supports white pine and mixed hardwood forest — the natural vegetation for well-drained glacial sands in New England. Droughtiness limits what can grow without irrigation, so natural vegetation tends toward drought-tolerant species.