The Ellenville Downtown Historic District in the Village of Ellenville in the town of Wawarsing, Ulster County, New York contains visible geographical and architectural elements that represent its origins as a commercial and industrial crossroads during Ulster County’s early 19th century development. Associated with events that reflect a broad pattern of state and national history such as the early westward expansion and settlement, the economic development that followed major transportation improvements (the Delaware and Hudson Canal), the growth and diversification of commercial centers and the role of the summer resort economy in areas outside major American urban centers, the Ellenville Downtown Historic District developed around a nucleus that was already present in 1858. The district also encompasses the physical evidence of growth and development-from early Jewish settlement in the region to the heyday of the “Borscht Belt” resort area following the Second World War. Ellenville, located in the valley between the Shawangunk and Catskill Mountains, did not develop until after the Revolutionary War, as clashes between Native American Indians and early European settlers’ limited development in the region. It was the construction of the D&H Canal, began in 1823, that spurred further transportation improvements and fostered significant settlement within the village---it is to this period that the earliest of the district’s buildings date.
Read the full file on Ellenville Downtown Historic District.
To see more photographs of National Register properties go
to our photostream on Flickr.
See our Weekly List (with previous highlights)