Middletown Historic District

Middletown Historic District is the old core of a small Shenandoah Valley town in Frederick County, Virginia. The town grew along the Valley Pike, now U.S. Route 11 or Main Street, after the General Assembly established it in 1794 on a sixty-acre plan laid out by Dr. Peter Senseney. The district covers about 100 acres and contains 234 contributing resources, mostly houses with their outbuildings. More than a dozen buildings use late-eighteenth-century log construction. Later vernacular I-houses often carry Folk Victorian, Greek Revival, Colonial Revival or Queen Anne details. Other resources include four churches, the Town Hall, former schools, warehouses, a theater and the Wayside Inn, the town's oldest continuously operated business. St. Thomas Chapel, a Gothic Revival church from about 1836, was already listed separately. Large half-acre lots, few losses and limited commercial growth preserve a record of the town's development as a cultural and educational center, with a period of significance of 1794 to 1952.