South Worcester Historic District

South Worcester is a small farming hamlet strung along Otsego County Route 40 for about a mile in the Charlotte River valley, in the northwestern foothills of the Catskills. The district holds 41 buildings, mostly wood-frame houses and outbuildings built between about 1810 and 1942, along with two historic cemeteries, an active dairy farm and surrounding fields and wooded hillsides. Federal buildings include a ca. 1830 law office and a ca. 1840 pharmacy shop. Greek Revival is seen in two mid-nineteenth-century churches and several farmhouses, and Italianate in a few residences. A rare saltbox-shaped blacksmith shop and a three-story bank barn illustrate the support buildings of a farming community. The hamlet was listed because it is an unusually complete example of the small centers that served rural central New York, offering business, schooling, worship and social life. Population decline and isolation after 1942 discouraged new construction, so the vernacular architecture and open rural setting remain largely intact.