Sharon Springs Historic District

Sharon Springs Historic District occupies the northeast portion of a rural village in Schoharie County, New York, where faults in a limestone bed yielded the mineral springs that gave the community its name. The district preserves the surviving core of a spa resort active from about 1825 to 1941. Its centerpiece is a group of four spring houses and four bathhouses, including the cast iron Magnesia Temple of 1863 and the nineteenth-century Lower and Inhalation Bath Houses. Around them stand large frame hotels such as the 1928 Mission style Adler and the Greek Revival American Hotel, along with about twenty boardinghouses, commercial blocks, churches, a 1904 synagogue and family estates. Roughly half the buildings are private residences, many of which once took in paying guests. Because automobile-era growth followed Route 20 instead, the spa area was left largely intact. The district is significant locally for this concentration of resort architecture.