Thanks to Board Member, Harriet Shapiro, and her surprising discovery of a tombstone written in Hebrew in Cornwall Bridge that we were aware of 
a piece of hidden Litchfield County history.
It was not until 1843 that Connecticut’s Judicial Committee granted Jews religious rights. But it was more than 50 years later that Judaism came to the Northwest Corner. By the end of the 19th century, Yankee farmers were abandoning their farms in Connecticut for more fertile land in the Midwest. At the same time Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe to escape persecution. Jewish relief societies in the United States tried to help them. In 1889, a 
wealthy German Jewish banker named Baron Maurice de Hirsch donated $2.4 million for resettling Russian Jews in the United States. The Jewish Agricultural Society in New York and the Baron de Hirsch Fund gave Jewish farmers small loans to establish farms in rural Connecticut, one of them just south of Cornwall Bridge .