Interview with Noel Elliott
IntervieweeInterview with
Noel Elliott
(Jamaican, 1925 - 2018)
Date2000 November 11
Mediumdigitized audio cassette tape
DimensionsDuration (side 1): 46 Minutes, 11 Seconds
Duration (side 2): 20 Minutes, 51 Seconds
Duration (total runtime): 1 Hour, 7 Minutes, 2 Seconds
Duration (side 2): 20 Minutes, 51 Seconds
Duration (total runtime): 1 Hour, 7 Minutes, 2 Seconds
ClassificationsInformation Artifacts
Credit LineGift of the CHS Exhibitions Department
Description(a-d) Audio cassette tape of an interview with Noel Elliott, who was interviewed by Fiona Vernal on November 11, 2000. (e) Black and white portrait photograph of Noel Elliott.
Topics discussed include cricket; migrating to the United States in 1944 via a farm labor contract at age 19; dealing with the realities of farm work; accommodation and social life at the labor camps; a typical workday; harvesting, curing, sweating, and measuring tobacco; remuneration and compulsory savings deductions in Jamaica (to guarantee the men would not abandon their contracts and stay in the U.S.); the wedding of Noel's brother; networking at the labor camps; initial impressions of Hartford; getting married to secure permanent residency in the U.S.; securing a job and employment history; the West Indian Social Club; and West Indian identity and generational differences.
2013.26.3a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.3e: photograph
Topics discussed include cricket; migrating to the United States in 1944 via a farm labor contract at age 19; dealing with the realities of farm work; accommodation and social life at the labor camps; a typical workday; harvesting, curing, sweating, and measuring tobacco; remuneration and compulsory savings deductions in Jamaica (to guarantee the men would not abandon their contracts and stay in the U.S.); the wedding of Noel's brother; networking at the labor camps; initial impressions of Hartford; getting married to secure permanent residency in the U.S.; securing a job and employment history; the West Indian Social Club; and West Indian identity and generational differences.
2013.26.3a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.3e: photograph
Object number2013.26.3a-e
NotesSubject Note: In 1999, the West Indian Social Club of Hartford and the West Indian Foundation asked the Connecticut Historical Society to join them in documenting the lives of the West Indian immigrants who first came to the Hartford area in the 1940s to work on local tobacco farms.
What began as a project designed to record the experiences of these early pioneers - mostly men from Jamaica - subsequently grew to include audio and videotaped interviews of men and women, elders and young people, longtime residents and more recent arrivals to the Greater Hartford area, both from Jamaica and the other English-speaking, independent countries in the Caribbean.
The exhibition explored a common thread that seems to link people’s individual stories: the challenge of putting down roots in a new place while maintaining ties with the people, history, and cultural heritage of their homelands in the West Indies.
The exhibition, "Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties: Greater Hartford’s West Indians," was on view at the Connecticut Historical Society from July 2, 2002 – August 31, 2003.
On View
Not on view
