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Colonial Cornwall quickly established those icons of the New England town, a Congregational church, a town meeting, and a school.  The first school was probably taught in a house, but within a few decades one-room schoolhouses were scattered across the Cornwalls--at the peak in 1855 there were 17 school districts in Cornwall, each with its own schoolhouse.

Almost all of Cornwall's early residents were farmers. Even ministers, lawyers, and millers generally were farmers as well.  They cut down the forests, piled stones into stone walls, and plowed the soil where they could.  Their farms were largely self-sufficient.  The men not only plowed, harvested, milked cows and cut firewood, but also served as their own carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, and harnessmakers.  The women conducted a range of home industries that included spinning, carding, weaving, making cheese and butter, salting down pork and beef, and manufacturing tallow candles and soap.  Land-locked and mountain-ringed, Cornwall residents found it difficult and costly either to bring in products from elsewhere or to carry out cash crops for sale.

Starting around 1810, Connecticut agriculture entered a protracted decline.  With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the development of the "West" (what we now call the Midwest), farmsteads throughout the more remote rural areas of Litchfield County were abandoned.  Many Cornwall residents left for greener pastures.  Others sought new activities to supplement farming.

Even as Connecticut's agriculture was declining, its rural areas were burgeoning with dispersed, small-scale manufacturing.  Yankee peddlers created a market for the manufacturers' products throughout the growing agricultural settlements of the South and West.  Mills and factories appeared almost wherever a waterfall provided a source of energy.  Indeed, contemporary scholarship emphasizes that the first stage of the industrial revolution in the United States was centered not in urban areas but rather in the proliferating mills and workshops of New England's rural areas and relatively isolated mill towns.  Cornwall was no exception.  Its industrial employees grew from 78 in 1845 to 129 in 1860, compared to about 160 farmers.

Much of Cornwall's industry processed raw materials from the local region. Cornwall was part of the then-famous Salisbury District iron region and much of its manufacturing was iron-related.  Even in colonial days, the nearby town of Salisbury had become a national center of iron production, and prior to 1800 three forges or ironworks were in operation in Cornwall.  By the mid-19th century, Cornwall had two blast furnaces and probably a plant for processing lime.

Charcoal-making for the iron works was a major rural industry that cut over Cornwall's forests every 20 to 30 years.  Between October and March of each year, wood-cutting teams cut thousands of cords of hardwood into four-foot lengths.  Charcoal makers--known as colliers--cleared and leveled a circular platform 30 to 40 feet in diameter, stacked 25 to 30 cords of wood on it, covered the pile with leaves and soil, and set it alight.  The carefully controlled burning required about two weeks to produce high-quality charcoal.