Trapps Mountain Hamlet Historic District

Trapps Mountain Hamlet is a mostly abandoned settlement on the Shawangunk Ridge in Ulster County, New York, beside a natural gap in the cliffs known as the Trapps. It grew from the late eighteenth century and declined by the 1940s, as a near-subsistence mountain community. Anecdotal and archaeological evidence suggests Native Americans displaced from the valleys below shared the ridge with European-American settlers into the late nineteenth century. The district includes a network of roads and trails, stone walls, six historic buildings, one in ruins, along with cellar holes, building sites, burial grounds and bridge abutments. Many dwellings used an unusual local framing method, called Shawangunk batten-plank, of thin vertical boards joined by heavy horizontal braces and lacking corner posts. Industrial remnants such as the Davis Mill site also survive. Because the Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park Preserve own most of the land, the remains can be studied and interpreted for the public.