The Eight Cornwalls

To some, the town of Cornwall, tucked away in the Litchfield Hills in the extreme northwestern corner of Connecticut, evokes the image of new England Sleepy Hollow, where, as Washington Irving wrote, "population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them." Three quarters of a century after the famous Connecticut minister Horace Bushnell declared that industrialization had brought an end to "The Age of Homespun," Cornwall farmers were still spinning wool from their own sheep into cloth by hand and grinding their grain at the town's water-driven gristmills.

But a deeper look at the history of this seemingly isolated town reveals its intimate and intricate interaction with the wider trends of the state, the nation, and indeed the world. Changes in beliefs, culture, technology, transportation, economics, education, and other spheres changed the life-- and the look--of the community. Both Cornwall's continuities and its transformations are well illustrated in this selection of photographs from the end of the Civil War to the start of World War II.

The English settlers who came from Massachusetts to form the Connecticut colony in the 1630s were Puritans, and, while interested in making a living, they sought to establish a society that would embody the principles of Bible Christianity. They organized towns centered geographically, politically, and socially, as well as spiritually, around the church. Just over a century later, descendents of the New England Puritans began to settle Cornwall and its adjoining towns, then the colony's last frontier. But they were a people who had already made the transition historians have characterized as "from Puritan to Yankee." While they were still predominantly Calvinist and often very devout, the pursuit of worldly advancement had become a far greater force in shaping their lives. It was the desire for land, not for holiness, that motivated their journey into the wilderness.

In 1738, the Connecticut colony auctioned off undivided shares in what became Cornwall. Purchasers had to be British subjects and residents of Connecticut and they had to clear land and build houses within a specified period of time. Most of those who purchased the shares, however, brought on credit, and intended not to settle there themselves but to resell, at a profit, their shares and the land they had received. In short, Cornwall from the start was a creature of land speculation. After a time, some of the shares passed to people who actually wanted to live in Cornwall, or at least to hire settlers to clear land and build houses on their property.

In contrast to earlier Connecticut settlements, Cornwall's first settlers did not establish a town residential area centered around the church with farm holdings in outlying areas. Rather, they selected land scattered throughout the entire extent of the township. For, as a study of Litchfield County by the Connecticut Agricultural Extension Service puts it, "Like gold, farm land is where you find it in Litchfield County... farmers are widely dispersed to make the most of scattered productive soils or level stretches of land." These isolated holdings only gradually developed into villages--often referred to as the six (or seven or even eight) Cornwalls.

Colonial Cornwall quickly established those icons of the New England town, a Congregational church, a town meeting, and a school. The first school was probably taught in a house, but within a few decades one-room schoolhouses were scattered across the Cornwalls--at the peak in 1855 there were 17 school districts in Cornwall, each with its own schoolhouse.

Almost all of Cornwall's early residents were farmers. Even ministers, lawyers, and millers generally were farmers as well. They cut down the forests, piled stones into stone walls, and plowed the soil where they could. Their farms were largely self-sufficient. The men not only plowed, harvested, milked cows and cut firewood, but also served as their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, and harnessmakers. The women conducted a range of home industries that included spinning, carding, weaving, making cheese and butter, salting down pork and beef, and manufacturing tallow candles and soap. Land-locked and mountain-ringed, Cornwall residents found it difficult and costly either to bring in products from elsewhere or to carry out cash crops for sale.

Starting around 1810, Connecticut agriculture entered a protracted decline. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the development of the "West" (what we now call the Midwest), farmsteads throughout the more remote rural areas of Litchfield County were abandoned. Many Cornwall residents left for greener pastures. Others sought new activities to supplement farming.

Even as Connecticut's agriculture was declining, its rural areas were burgeoning with dispersed, small-scale manufacturing. Yankee peddlers created a market for the manufacturers' products throughout the growing agricultural settlements of the South and West. Mills and factories appeared almost wherever a waterfall provided a source of energy. Indeed, contemporary scholarship emphasizes that the first stage of the industrial revolution in the United States was centered not in urban areas but rather in the proliferating mills and workshops of New England's rural areas and relatively isolated mill towns. Cornwall was no exception. Its industrial employees grew from 78 in 1845 to 129 in 1860, compared to about 160 farmers.

Much of Cornwall's industry processed raw materials from the local region. Cornwall was part of the then-famous Salisbury District iron region and much of its manufacturing was iron-related. Even in colonial days, the nearby town of Salisbury had become a national center of iron production, and prior to 1800 three forges or ironworks were in operation in Cornwall. By the mid-19th century, Cornwall had two blast furnaces and probably a plant for processing lime.

Charcoal-making for the iron works was a major rural industry that cut over Cornwall's forests every 20 to 30 years. Between October and March of each year, wood-cutting teams cut thousands of cords of hardwood into four-foot lengths. Charcoal makers--known as colliers--cleared and leveled a circular platform 30 to 40 feet in diameter, stacked 25 to 30 cords of wood on it, covered the pile with leaves and soil, and set it alight. The carefully controlled burning required about two weeks to produce high-quality charcoal.

Many manufacturing plants, such as West Cornwall's shear shops, made finished products from iron. Other Cornwall industries used local raw materials to produce lumber, vinegar, cheese, and tanned hides.

The Housatonic Railroad reached Cornwall in the early 1840s, ending "a hundred years of solitude." Mail, newspapers, and non-local products could come quickly and easily into town. The railroad stops of Cornwall Bridge and West Cornwall became the commercial centers of the town, while commerce largely disappeared in the other villages. Both farm and manufactured products could reach a national market.

Yet Cornwall's manufacturing era was not to last. As industry shifted from waterpower and firewood to coal and then electricity as prime energy sources, rural industry in Cornwall, as elsewhere, declined. The late 19th and early 20th century saw de-industrialization in this rural region, followed by depopulation as people migrated to urban areas with more employment. Cornwall's population plummeted from a peak of 2,041 in 1850 to a nadir of 834 in 1920. By 1926, a local history noted that no manufacturing remained in Cornwall.

Cornwall, like the rest of rural Connecticut, was religiously and ethnically homogeneous for its first century. (Racially it was less homogeneous: In 1775, when the population was barely 1,000, it had 38 "negroes," half slaves, half "free negroes.") The original Congregational church was only gradually supplemented by Baptist, Methodist, and other Protestant denominations. But in the wake of the Irish potato famine, the huge Irish migration to Connecticut reached all the way to Cornwall, where in 1850 the first Roman Catholic mission church was founded to serve the growing Irish population. Many worked in the local factories or as farm laborers. As German, French, English, Italian, and French Canadian immigrants flooded Connecticut, they too found their way to remote Cornwall. The 1900 Census found 25 blacks among Cornwall's 1,175 residents; there were three black families and 11 black women, mostly from the South, working as servants. By the early 20th century the tiny town even had a Jewish community with its own rabbi.

Both old families and newcomers continued to farm in Cornwall, but the focus shifted from general farming for home use to commercial dairy farming. The growth of near by cities and the belief in the virtue of milk for health and nutrition created a large market for fresh milk in New York, New Haven, Hartford, and other cities. Farming in Cornwall, as in much of Connecticut's rural hinterland, converted to the dairy. Milk could be put on the train and delivered within a few hours to New York and other cities. As dairy farmer Ralph Scoville observed, "They depended on the train to get rid of the milk." By the end of the 1930s, some Litchfield County farms could be described as specialized fluid milk factories. They worked by scientifically based methods, purchased much of their feed and other raw materials, and utilized sophisticated machinery. The Farm Bureau and the Agricultural Extension Service developed as important institutions that helped keep Cornwall farmers up-to-date.

Yet the traditions of old-time farming died hard. In 1927, when Ralph Scoville first started working on the Scoville farm, the tractor had not supplanted the horse. He recalls that grain was harvested with a cradle and thrashed by hand—using a homemade thrasher the hinge point of which was made from the skin of an eel from nearby Cream Hill Lake. Farmers took their grain to be ground at a water-driven mill. Cider, vinegar, and even medications were produced at home. Ice was cut on local lakes. And some clothing was still produced from wool sheared from the farm's own sheep, spun into yarn on a spinning wheel, and woven on a loom. "You run the shuttle through and you push it through again and you make what you want for your cloth. That's where most of your clothes, your wool clothes, came from," Scoville recalls. In 1940, more than half the farm families in Litchfield County still cooked with wood.

Cornwall's forests were regularly re-cut for charcoal for the iron and other industries well into the 20th century. Photographs of Cornwall until the 1920s show an almost entirely deforested environment—typical of rural areas throughout the state. With the decline of industry and agriculture, large areas spontaneously reforested. The state Department of Agriculture also encouraged farmers to engage in deliberate reforestation—an effort that was aided in the 1930s by the reforestation efforts of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Connecticut's rising conservation movement found the cheap post-agricultural land of Cornwall an obvious target for incorporation in state parks and forests, which came to include a very substantial portion of the town's land surface. The town's reforestation is typical not only of rural Connecticut, but, as urban geographers have discovered, of the rural hinterland throughout the East Coast megalopolis.

Cornwall Bridge
Cornwall Center
Cream Hill
Cornwall Village
West Cornwall
East Cornwall
Cornwall Hollow
North Cornwall