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.