Cornwall Historical Society History

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As population declined, many of the Cornwalls vanished as inhabited settlements, leaving only West Cornwall, Cornwall Bridge, and Cornwall Village as population centers. Social and organizational life ceased to be centered in the local villages and hamlets and became increasingly town-wide.

As both agriculture and industry declined, the Litchfield Hills began to develop a new role as a vacationland. As America urbanized in the decades that followed the Civil War, seasonal retreats in rural areas became a major part of the lifestyle of those who could afford them. Cornwall exemplified the picturesque scenery and rural way of life prized by those seeking a respite from city life. By the 1880s, Cornwall had become a place for summer visiting by people from New York and other cities. The Cornwall Star reported that in August, 1880 there were "over 125 summer visitors in the village and applications from scores cannot be accommodated."

By the 1920s, summer boarding declined, to be replaced by urban residents ("city people," "summer people," or "New Yorkers" in local parlance) who bought homes in Cornwall and spent part or all of their summers there. By the 1920s a substantial part of Cornwall's population had become seasonal residents. Cornwall eventually became a center of literary culture in particular, represented by such names as James Thurber, Carl and Mark Van Doren, Henry Seidel Canby, and Lewis Gannett.

This influx of people who made their living in the city was made possible by changes in transportation. Cars begin to show up in Cornwall photographs early in the 20^th century. And cars demanded better roads. So an area hard to reach from the city except by train became accessible by the cars that "city people" began to have in increasing numbers. By the end of the 1920s the state was including Cornwall in its plans for a state highway system, which was originally developed in large part to help rural areas get their products to market. The Rural Road improvement Act of 1931 for the first time provided state funds for town roads. Route 7, in particular, brought Cornwall closer to New York City.

Technological change affected Cornwall farm life as well. By the end of World War II, 84 per cent of Litchfield County farms had automobiles and others had trucks. Some 90 percent of all Litchfield County farm dwellings had electricity, 87 percent had telephones, and 93 percent had radios.

Two events can serve as emblems of the ways that transportation and increased contact with the outside world were changing deeply established patterns of Cornwall life by the end of the 1930s. Cornwall had no high school; to attend one Cornwall students had to take the train each day to the nearby towns of Canaan or New Milford. In 1939, after 15 years of debate, the six towns of the Northwest Corner established the Housatonic Valley Regional High School, the first regional high school in New England. The following year, as the result of even more years of debate, Cornwall replaced its four remaining one-room district schools with the new, graded Cornwall Consolidated School. Even this apparent progress was not welcomed by all: A local farmer is reported to have opposed building a consolidated school with a bathroom because then the children of his workers would want toilets in their homes.

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In the early 1940s, the Connecticut Agricultural Extension Service conducted a study of rural Litchfield County social organization, whose results apply, no doubt with some local variations, to Cornwall. A "striking characteristic," said the study, was the division of the region's population into "three broad segments—the farmers, the seasonal residents and the resident-nonfarmers." "The city businessman, the industrial worker, the office clerk, the part-time farmer and the seasonal summer resident all live side by side, interspersed among commercial farmers."

The farmers ranged from larger-farm owners with fifty or more cows to "an assortment of part-time farmers, chronic tenants, farm laborers, and unsuccessful or marginal owners." Many a part-time farmer also worked as a carpenter, mechanic, mail carrier, baker, caterer, or caretaker. A pattern of "piecing together a living out of diverse activities" reflected the fact that "the tradition of the Yankee handyman and jack-of-all trades still persists, a survival of the self-sufficient economy."

The non-farm population included "a small, rather self-conscious aristocracy of wealth and family" of "old Yankee stock whose families have lived in the community for several generations." (Any census of Cornwall's "aristocracy" would surely have included several farm families as well.) A large middle class was composed of "merchants, dealers, local professional men, skilled industrial workers and clerical and sales people who work either in the village near their homes or in a nearby large town or city." While some Cornwall residents commuted to factory jobs in near by towns, in 1940 more than half of all non-farm workers in Cornwall were engaged in service industries, often servicing the estates of the seasonal population. Residents also included "unskilled and occasional laborers, domestic servants and, at the very bottom a miscellany of indigent relief cases and chronically unemployed."

By the late 1930s, "summer people" who owned their own homes in Cornwall were a well-established part of the community. But, as the Connecticut Agricultural Extension Service's study of rural Litchfield County found for the county as a whole, seasonal residents' "contacts with the year-round residents who are their neighbors, provisioners, or domestic servants are likely to be fragmentary and casual—of short duration and rather superficial." Fred Bate, Jr., West Cornwall butcher and longtime leader of the Cornwall Volunteer Fire Department, concurs. "You had two levels before the war. The war sort of brought people back to a level in the sense that, whether you've got a lot of money or whether you haven't got any, you're still here."