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(Page 4 of 5)
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 20th
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.
* * *
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."
Continued
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