Cornwall Pest Control Between the Mountains and the Moodna

Cornwall was settled by Scottish colonists in the 1680s and took its current name in 1797. In the 1800s it became a health retreat and summer resort for New Yorkers who came up the Hudson for mountain air. About 12,900 people lived here at the 2020 Census, spread across roughly 28 square miles.

The town is shaped by its landforms. Storm King Mountain rises over the river to the southeast, and the 1960s fight to stop a power plant on it became one of the founding battles of the American environmental movement. Black Rock Forest, a research forest established in the late 1920s and later held by Harvard, covers much of the high ground to the south. Schunemunk Mountain, the town's highest point at about 1,540 feet, rises to the west.

Moodna Creek winds through the valleys between them, past the old mill hamlets, under the tall Moodna Viaduct rail trestle and into a tidal marsh at the Hudson. Cornwall includes the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson, the hamlet of Mountainville, and smaller places like Firthcliffe, Canterbury and part of Salisbury Mills.

All that woods and water means wildlife lives close to Cornwall homes, and houses built in the resort era and the decades after have plenty of ways in. Bats, raccoons and squirrels head the wildlife list. Carpenter ants and termites go after older wood, and moisture pests thrive in basements near the creek.

The resort years left a mark on the housing stock. In 1846 the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis settled on an estate he called Idlewild, and the name lives on in local streets and a park. Big summer houses and boarding homes from that era were built with deep porches, tall attics, slate roofs and stone cellars. Many have been modernized inside, but the rooflines and foundations are original, and those are the parts animals test first.