Elm Street Historic District

Elm Street runs through Hatfield on higher ground between the Mill River and the Connecticut River, with open fields stretching south to the water. The historic district around it holds 267 contributing resources, including houses, barns and other farm buildings built from the mid-18th century onward. Three Georgian houses, among them the ca. 1768 Elisha Hubbard Tavern, anchor the earliest period, followed by Federal houses with delicate Adamesque door surrounds and by Greek Revival farmhouses turned to face their side yards. In the mid-19th century the street changed. Tenement houses and small cottages were built for Irish and French Canadian immigrants and for farm laborers, alongside broom shops and tobacco barns. African American families also lived here. One house, at 27 Elm Street, uses an unusually early plank-frame technique. Together these buildings and fields record the working life of a New England farming neighborhood over more than two centuries.