Delanson Historic District

Along Main Street in the village of Delanson, nineteen properties form the only intact concentration of fashionable late Victorian architecture in the town of Duanesburg. Seventeen houses, a former general store and a Methodist church, with a number of barns and sheds, sit on small lots set back at even distances. Most are one-and-a-half or two-story frame buildings dating from about 1860 to 1890. Many show Italianate features such as low hipped roofs, bracketed eaves and projecting bays, while others show Second Empire, Gothic Revival and Queen Anne/Eastlake influences. The neighborhood grew after the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad began construction through the valley in 1861, bringing railroad workers, coal yards and commerce. The village prospered for several decades, then declined as rail use fell and the coal yards closed in 1936. Because little mid-twentieth-century building followed, the street keeps the look of a prosperous late nineteenth-century residential neighborhood.