Cornwall Hollow

The prominent early settlers of Cornwall Hollow were the families of Benjamin Sedgwick and Jonathan Hurlburt, who bought land totaling over one thousand acres in the Hollow in the late 1740s. The Sedgwick property at one point reached "full two and a half miles eastward into the towns of Goshen and Norfolk." Theodore Sedgwick, who grew up in the Hollow, graduated from Yale College in 1765, became a member of Congress from Massachusetts, and served as Speaker of the House. Major General John Sedgwick, one of Cornwall's most famous local sons, played important roles in the Civil War battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness; he died in 1864 at Spottsylvania. A monument in the Hollow memorializes John Sedgwick.
Cornwall Hollow was on the highway from Canaan to Goshen and Litchfield. In an 1865 speech, General Charles F. Sedgwick recalled, "I have heard my mother speak of the passage of a part of Rochambeau's French army through the Hollow in 1781, on its way from Rhode Island to Virginia, to assist in the capture of Cornwallis."
Early enterprises in the Hollow included a shop-joiner who made ox-yokes and bows; a part-time dentist; a blacksmith; a barrel-maker; and a tavern-keeper. One precocious Yankee inventor ran a spinning wheel by waterpower with "a female drawing off the threads from a distaff of flax with both hands, at a very rapid rate."
 

Cornwall Hollow had its own social life. The blacksmith shop, Charles F. Sedgwick recalled in 1865, "was a great place of resort for the men of the neighborhood on rainy days, and all the common topics of the day, public and private, received ample discussion and appropriate criticism." In the house of a tavern-keeper "all the dancing parties were held which I ever knew of in the Hollow, and they were not infrequent in my early days."
As late as 1865, Sedgwick observed "the permanence of family names" in the Hollow: "The Harrisons, Hurlburts, Bradfords, Wilcoxes, Merwins, Fords, and Sedgwicks, descendants of old families, still remain here, or in the near neighborhood," and still occupied most of the territory of the Hollow.
Few locations better illustrate the depopulation of Cornwall over the late 19th and early 20th centuries than the heart of Cornwall Hollow. By the mid-1920s, that area had an unused Baptist Church, a functioning school house, three cemeteries, and the Sedgwick monument.

The birthplace in 1813 of Major General John Sedgwick housed several
generations of Sedgwicks. The house was photographed in 1928.

North Cornwall

North Cornwall was never so much a concentrated settlement as a region. It was in large part the domain of various branches of the Scoville family, who traced their lineage back to early settlers of the town. The Second Congregational Church, with its well-known Christopher Wren-style steeple, was built here in 1826. Another building had multiple uses as a glove factory, store, schoolhouse, and chapel.
A memoir by Harriet Devan Soule recounts vivid childhood memories of the Scoville Farm in the 1890s. "Most mornings we rattled up to the farmhouse just as Cousin Sam and his helpers, crook-necked Joe and silent Dunny, came hustling out of the kitchen door to get on with their work. They had already milked all the cows by hand and turned them out to pasture. They had fetched water from the barn spring and washed down the head racks and stanchions where the cows had stood to be milked, ... carried the tall, heavy milk cans into the milk room to cool, washed their hands and arms in the tin basin that, with towels, hung down beside the spring-water in a corner of the kitchen, and combed their hair before the cracked mirror that hung nearby." 
Harriet Soule's Aunt Maria "was the undisputed ruler of the kitchen and the men's cleanup routine was her ruling. Only after it had been carried out to her satisfaction would she heap their plates with meat, potato, and muffin breakfasts from the huge black stove." When the men had left, "old Hungarian Mary, rough-tongued but warm and loyal of heart and indefatigable in work, took over. She scrubbed the table, filled plates for Aunt Maria, Lil and herself, and they all sat down to eat breakfast together."
Harriet also recalled the neighborhood social life. "When we grew old enough, we went to the neighborhood Sunday night sings in the long front room of the farmhouse. All the chairs and the horsehair sofa were filled with women and girls, and the men and a few boys carried in their own from other rooms and sat together at the dining room end of the room.  When all were seated, with Mrs. Hedden at the piano, the well-worn 1886 Gospel Hymns were passed around. People all over the room, children and all, called the numbers of the hymns they wanted." Songs included Hold the Fort, for I am Coming and Pull for the Shore Sailor! Pull for the Shore! "How they did sing out! They might have been heard a mile away."

CHS