By conventional economic standards, Cornwall might well be judged a failure. Its agriculture declined and declined again, and its brief flurry of industrialization ended with a long period of industrial decline. It has been a hard place to make a living, and certainly no place to make a fortune. Those with an eye to the main chance have had good reason to seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Yet ironically, many of the characteristics of Cornwall that are cherished today are partially the result of that failure. The deep, romantic forests and their abundant wildlife both reflect the shrinking of farms and the decline of charcoal burning. Substantial natural areas could be preserved as state forest largely because the land was of so little value for other purposes. The scarcity of modern real estate development--the absence of malls, factories, and tract housing, for example--bespeaks the area's lack of economic promise. So does the presence of old houses, schoolhouses, stores, and farmsteads of types that elsewhere have been long since demolished.

With town-meeting government, every resident is free to speak her or his mind, cast an equal vote on any matter of public importance, and serve, usually without pay, on the dozens of boards and commissions that do the work of the town. It therefore represents an icon of democracy. But it has vanished from larger, more economically dynamic towns. The hardness of Cornwall life, if now little more than a memory, has preserved respect for hardihood, self-reliance, independence of spirit, and the diversified skills that make rural survival possible. At the same time, a commitment to community born of tradition, need for mutual aid, and values that find satisfaction in sociality and service, survived in this rural backwater notwithstanding its divisions and conflicts. If, in contrast to Sleepy Hollow, Cornwall's "population, manners, and customs" have not "remained fixed," it is a place whose continuities with the past nonetheless remain important for both residents and visitors.