Cornwall Historical Society History

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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 20^th 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 20^th 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.