Mills Pond District

Mills Pond District is a 200-acre corridor along N.Y. Route 25A in St. James, Suffolk County, where a small Long Island farming hamlet survives in its original setting. About 130 acres of open land have been cultivated continuously for 300 years, and roughly 50 acres of woodland form part of a larger preserved tract. Nine structures, mostly from the 18th and early 19th centuries, cluster around Mills Pond. Timothy Mills bought land here in 1693, and his family farmed the area for generations. The centerpiece is the Mills Homestead, a Greek Revival house built in 1837 for William Wickham Mills and designed by New York architect Calvin Pollard. Other buildings include early barns, an ice house, a gambrel-roofed house, a "half house" and several farm dwellings. The district was listed because the buildings still stand in the agricultural landscape that produced them, and because the surrounding stretch of North Country Road keeps its rural character.