Montville — The descendants of the Jewish families who came to the rural village of Chesterfield in the late 1800s are not farmers, and none still live in Chesterfield.

They are lawyers, doctors and academics, and everything in between, and most of their parents or grandparents moved from Montville generations ago. Some would go on to help build the Gold Star Memorial Bridge, one was the mayor of New London, and others opened businesses across Connecticut.

It may not be the agrarian utopia that German philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch envisioned when he decided to help European Jews form small agricultural "colonies" across the United States, including this rural section of Montville that served as the home to the Russian Jewish families that came from New York to land that Yankee famers had sold in their rush to move west.

But Sunday, at a ceremony to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the building of New England Hebrew Farmers of the Emmanuel Society's synagogue, descendants of the original settlers agreed that while farming wasn’t their legacy, the experiment can still be considered a success.

“They succeeded because they made it possible for their children and their grandchildren ... to be whatever their natural talents allowed them to be,” said Mary Donahue, a historian who wrote a book about Jewish farmers in Connecticut.

As traffic roared past the wooded site of the former synagogue, Nancy Savin led a ceremony Sunday that paid tribute to the nine families who left harsh and dirty conditions in New York City to try to farm the rocky Connecticut soil in the 1880s.

They were led by Savin's great-great-grandfather, Hirsch Kaplan, to Chesterfield. While farming in Chesterfield proved difficult, the community adapted, building clothing factories and a creamery to sell butter, milk and cream to the hotels and restaurants in nearby towns. Many also turned their homes into summer boarding houses.

Over the decades, most of the families left for other cities or died. By the 1930s there were only 10 descendants of the original congregation left in Chesterfield. Savin, who remembers attending services in the synagogue on the High Holidays as a child, stood before the site where it was destroyed by an arsonist in 1975.

Savin has worked to preserve the memory of the people who came to Chesterfield, overseeing the installation of a monument at the site in 1986, registering the New England Hebrew Farmers of the Emanuel Society as a religious nonprofit, and working to get the property designated as an archaeological preserve and listed on the Connecticut and national registers of historic places.

She has also connected dozens of people related to the original settlers to the site and each other. On Sunday, several of the descendants walked along a stretch of Route 85 in Chesterfield from their cars to reach the secluded spot where the synagogue, creamery, and ritual bath once stood, pinning name tags to their chests and comparing family trees.

"If someone doesn't keep this stuff going, by the time you're interested it's gone," said John Lieberman, a Kentucky resident whose ancestors had settled in Chesterfield and owned a farm there.

At a lunch after Sunday's ceremony that served as the annual meeting of the New England Hebrew Farmers Society, Lieberman and a handful of other descendants of the New England Hebrew Farmers, said a Jewish prayer and sang "happy anniversary to us" before digging into a cake.

Savin's next goals, she said, are to finish a book about the farmers and to secure funding to restore the stone walls of the creamery.

Catherine Labadia, an archaeologist with the state Historic Preservation Office, said in her remarks Sunday that anniversaries like the one celebrated Sunday should serve as motivation to continue the work of keeping the memory of the settlers alive.

"We should start looking forward to the next 125 years," she said.

m.shanahan@theday.com