Cornwall, CT

Focus On Members

-Announcements-

New site launched! Thanks to Michael Lannen and his team at Eternity Web

Welcome to Cornwall, CT

VISITOR INFO » Cornwall, CT

www.cornwallct.org

To some, the town of Cornwall, tucked away in the Litchfield Hills in the extreme northwestern corner of Connecticut, evokes the image of new England Sleepy Hollow, where, as Washington Irving wrote, "population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them." Three quarters of a century after the famous Connecticut minister Horace Bushnell declared that industrialization had brought an end to "The Age of Homespun," Cornwall farmers were still spinning wool from their own sheep into cloth by hand and grinding their grain at the town's water-driven gristmills.

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.

Covered Bridge, Cornwall

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.