Northside Historic District

Northside is a residential neighborhood of Waterford, New York, lying between Waterford village and the city of Cohoes along Saratoga Avenue. Its location beside a sixteen-foot drop in the Mohawk River made it a natural site for mills, powered first by King's Power Canal, begun about 1828, and later by water drawn from the Champlain Canal. Factories produced flour, buttons, knitted goods, barrels, fire engines and more. The homes built for mill owners and workers survive in a range of styles, from two nearly identical 1830 Greek Revival temple-form houses, built by Hugh White and William Mansfield, to small Greek Revival cottages, Italianate houses, a Victorian mansion with a mansard roof, and Colonial Revival dwellings. The White house was moved to Museum Lane to save it from demolition and is now a museum. The district was recognized because its buildings show the stages of industrial growth between 1830 and 1900 and the different social levels of a working community.