Thayer Farmstead

Just south of the Mexico village line in Oswego County, this thirteen-acre farmstead preserves the core of a much larger nineteenth-century farm. The main building is a wood-frame house built about 1836 for Benzalier Thayer, a mill owner and farmer. A two-story central block with a recessed entry porch and Tuscan columns is flanked by symmetrical one-story wings. Across the road stands a horse barn from the same period, along with a stone boundary wall and two hand-dug wells. The house combines Federal-style details with Greek Revival-style columns, and its center-pavilion form is rare in the county; no other intact example exists in Mexico. Later owners included a hardware merchant and, from 1901, the Castle family, who farmed the land. Over time the acreage shrank and other farm buildings were lost, yet the house, barn, walls, wells and cultivated fields still show how agriculture shaped Mexico's economy in the early nineteenth century.