Rumors persist that Dudleytown is haunted and that people have experienced the paranormal there. Repetition of these old tales and publicity connected with recent films and books have led to trespassing and vandalism. Since Dudleytown is in private hands, the owners have asked for and received police protection. The Town of Cornwall, through the State Police, enforces a year-round parking ban.
The land which later was called Dudleytown was
distributed among the earliest divisions of the land in
Cornwall to a man named Thomas Griffiths. In 1742, he
was listed among the first tax payers in the town – he
paid 56 pounds to the British for himself and a wife,
two oxen, two cows and two horses – and appears to have
been the fourth wealthiest man in Cornwall in that year.
The land he had chosen was on a rugged plateau in the
south central section of Cornwall where the soil was
poor and water was scarce. His family had disappeared
from the town’s census by 1778. Other families joined
the Griffiths on that plateau, among them several Dudley
families, enough to cause local custom to name the place
Dudleytown. In the early years the settlers kept to the
hills for safety from Indian attack (which in Cornwall
never came) and to be near water sources in the rocky
hillsides.
Other families who prospered in Dudleytown in the 18th
and 19th centuries include Cooks, and Joneses, some of
them building what were then fine homes. One of the
early Cooks was a tailor. Others farmed or kept orchards
and traded out in the rest of Cornwall for needed goods
and groceries. Dudleytowners made and repaired their own
boots. At a Dudleytown store they bought rum, even lace
and silks. The children went to schools in Cornwall or
in nearby Warren.
There was no settled church in Dudleytown and those who
attended Sunday meetings went down to Cornwall Village.
No graveyard exists on that old hillside for everyone
who died was buried in Cornwall proper or in one of the
several other cemeteries in town.
Life in Dudleytown was not very different from the lives
others led in 18th and 19th century Cornwall. True, the
land was only sufficient, the roads poor, and the big
farms in Cornwall Hollow and on Cream Hill were richer
by far. Still stories from that time tell of a peaceful
existence, troubled only by poor land and, by 1810, by
the departure of younger sons, then families, for better
lives out west. The call to migrate reduced the
population of Dudleytown to a few families who, by the
end of the 19th century still lived in that remote
hillside.
Harriet Clark, who lived to be 103 and left many
memories of Cornwall, recalled seeing a few tumbledown
houses in Dudleytown in the 1930’s. Her family had
relations who had lived there and left letters and
memories from which this essay is drawn. Harriet
remembered that someone leased and cleared some land in
South Dudleytown in the 1940’s for grazing but the place
was soon covered with wild blueberries which the
townspeople hiked up to pick.
Dudleytown became a hard place to make a living. After
World War II, summer visitors acquired land nearby and
built new homes. The area remains remote, not served by
good roads, a place of cellar holes, old lilac bushes
and underbrush.
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