Middlefield Hamlet Historic District

Middlefield Hamlet is a small crossroads community in the Cherry Valley of Otsego County, New York, where 28 properties form a historic district. Most are frame houses built between about 1795 and 1860 in Federal and Greek Revival styles, along with a Greek Revival store, a Carpenter Gothic cottage and a transitional Greek Revival/Italianate house of 1859. The largest building is the Pinney Tavern, a Federal house begun around 1795 and given a portico about 1833; it contains a third-floor hall used by a Masonic lodge and wall painting attributed to William Price. The hamlet, first called Clarksville, prospered on stage traffic and water power, supporting tanneries, mills, stores, inns and a school. Later railroads and highways changed many similar hamlets, but Middlefield's relative isolation and twentieth-century decline left its buildings and layout largely intact. The district is valued as a clear example of how rural crossroads settlements developed through 1910.