Pound Ridge Historic District

Pound Ridge's historic hamlet sits on a small plateau in far eastern Westchester County, roughly two miles north of the Connecticut border. The district covers about ninety-five acres and includes fifty-two buildings, most of them white frame houses, churches and civic buildings dating between 1758 and about 1950, with the majority from 1780 to 1852. Many belonged to members of the Lockwood family. The hamlet declined economically after the Civil War, when cheap imported baskets undercut a local trade and no railroad arrived, so construction was mostly limited to porches, bays and siding. In the late 1920s, newcomers from New York and other cities began buying country homes. Among them, inventor and antiquarian Hiram Halle bought thirty buildings and between 1928 and 1941 removed many Victorian additions, adding Palladian windows, bow-front and sail-front shop windows and imported European interior features. The buildings still show their basic historic forms and classical detail, reflecting links to Connecticut and New England building traditions.