Sharon Springs is a village in Schoharie County, New York, United States. The population was 547 at the 2000 census, and is estimated at 525 in 2008[1]. The name derives from the hometown of the first white settlers, Sharon, Connecticut, and the important springs in the village. Sharon Springs, Kansas is its namesake, settled by former residents of this Upstate New York village.
The Village of Sharon Springs sits in the northwest part of the Town of Sharon, New York, approximately 50 miles west of Albany, the state capital. This tidy village is near some of New York State's most popular attractions. Howe Caverns is 15 miles to the south while The Mohawk River and Erie Canal are only 10 miles to the north. Cooperstown, New York, home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, The Farmer's Museum and The Fenimore Art Museum, is 25 miles to the west and the Catskill Park is 50 miles to the south.
Sharon Springs, recognized by both the National Historic Register as well as New York State's Register of Historic Places as a historic spa village, boasts some attractions of her own. In addition to the collection of fully and partially restored 19th century American resort and residential architecture which can be enjoyed year-round, Sharon Springs also plays host to these seasonal events: the annual Tractor & Antique Power Show has been held in June since 1992; summer brings the Summer Concerts Series, which has been going strong every Wednesday night in July and August since 1994; and starting in 2009, the annual Harvest Festival is held in September.
History
Prior to being claimed and settled by Great Britain as part of its Province of New York, Sharon Springs was frequented by the indiginous Iroquois population for its healing waters. Following Britain's Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Crown formed Tryon County, New York in 1772, which represented some of the westernmost reaches of its original Thirteen Colonies. Sharon Springs, then known as the town of New Dorlach, was settled around 1780, becoming part of the wide-ranging county. Stretching from the Adirondack Mountains to the Delaware River, Tryon County boasted a pre-Revolutionary War farming community of 10,000.
During the American Revolution, the Town of Sharon, New York saw limited fighting. The Battle of Sharon was fought on July 10, 1781. After burning down 12 homes in a small Canajoharie River settlement and claiming victory in the Battle of Currytown on July 9, approximately 300 British and Iroquois troups commanded by John Doxtader encamped later that day at the Sharon Springs Swamp, near the present-day intersection of Route 20 and County Road 34. Colonel Marius Willett of the American forces headed to their camp with a force of 150 men, attacking the redcoats in the dense swamp, killing 40. Doxtader's men fled and Willett claimed The Battle of Sharon as an American victory.[2]
During and after the Revolution, Sharon Springs was part of the Town of Schoharie in Tryon County. In 1784, Tryon County was renamed Montgomery County, New York to honor General Richard Montgomery, an American war hero who gave his life trying to capture the city of Quebec. In 1791, Otsego County, New York broke off from Montgomery County, and in 1795, Schoharie County, New York was formed from adjoining parts of Otsego and Albany Counties. The Town of Sharon was formed shortly after in 1797, and Sharon Springs set itself apart from the Town of Sharon in 1871 by incorporating as a village. In the process, it absorbed the neighboring community of Rockville.
The early village was a subordinate community to other prominent settlements in the town, such as Beekmans Corners and Leesville, but thanks to its sulfur, magnesium, and chalybeate mineral springs, Sharon Springs grew into a highly fashionable spa during the 19th century. At its height, Sharon Springs hosted 10,000 visitors in the summer season, patronized by members of the Vanderbilt railroad family, Oscar Wilde (who gave a lecture at the now-demolished Pavilion Hotel on 11 August 1882), the social arbiter Ward McAllister, foreign diplomats such as the ambassadors of Chile, Portugal, Belgium, and Peru, and multimillionaire Cuban sugar planters such as Tomas Terry (the paternal grandfather of the French designer Emilio Terry). Direct ferry-to-stagecoach lines connected New York City to Sharon Springs, later followed by rail lines connecting the spa village to New York City and Boston through connections in Albany and Cobleskill.
The most famous of the springs in the village, then as now, was the so-called Gardner Spring, which was owned by the owner of the Pavilion Hotel. As reported in the New York Times on 30 August 1875, "So prodigious is the amount of sulfur-gas in the Gardner Spring that the waters of this creek are rendered as white as milk, and the stones are covered with a thick deposit. All the objects which have been thrown into the stream from above—old shoes, tin pails, and other things of a similar nature—become transmuted by the mineral. Some of them become a snowy white, and others are turned to a deep black. The green weeds that grow upon the sides and bottoms of such creeks are here perfectly white, and at first one can hardly tell their nature, but mistakes them for long films of the sulphur deposit."
According to an article published in The New York Times (26 August 2000), Sharon Springs lost its fashionable Social Register set to the horse-racing attractions of Saratoga Springs. Wealthy Jewish families of German origin, who were unwelcome at Saratoga due to the prevailing social bias of the time, filled the void and "made Sharon Springs a refuge of their own." Eventually, these families moved on to other, more modern resorts, and the village began to fade economically. Other factors that exacerbated the village's early 20th century decline were Prohibition (which reduced the need for the local hop harvest) and the opening of the New York State Thruway (which routed traffic away from the area).
As the cited New York Times article went on to explain, "After World War II, Sharon Springs got a second wind from the West German government, which paid medical care reparations to Holocaust survivors, holding that therapeutic spa vacations were a legitimate part of the medical package." In the summer of 1946, one of the busboys at the Spanish Colonial Revival style Adler Hotel was Edward I. Koch, the future mayor of New York City. The 1970s through the 1990s saw the succession of secular Jewish tourists to Sharon Springs by Hasidim and ultra-Orthodox Jewish visitors, fed in part by a parallel displacement in the nearby Borsht Belt[3]. Their time in Sharon Springs is documented in "The Short Season of Sharon Springs," published by Cornell University Press in 1980. A host of Hasidim-owned and frequented hotels flourished in the village, bridging Sharon Springs' shining past as a world-class resort for the rich and famous and its recent ascent as a regional travel and weekend destination.
Sharon Springs rebirth
The village of Sharon Springs, after drifting gently (and not so gently at times) into an almost collective state of hopelessly rundown oblivion in the late 1980s, has enjoyed a resurgence of sorts in the last 15 years. Much of this has been attributed to both a stabilization of the architecturally significant remaining structures in the community (arson leveled many of the old abandoned hotels during the mid 20th Century) and an infusion of young, ambitious buyers from downstate New York looking for a cheaper means to start a living. The New York Times cites the revival to "the uninterruped supply of affluent, educated second-homers from New York City (3.5 hours away) and Columbia County (2 hours away)... and the exponential growth of a new travel phenomenon, heritage tourism: the quest for things historic by well-heeled tourists."[4]
One of the watershed examples in the rebirth was the ground up restoration of The American Hotel which is prominently located on Main Street of the village. Purchased in a collapsing and abandoned condition in 1996 buyers Doug Plummer and Garth Roberts slowly began the rebuilding of this two-story structure into what became an award winning (for preservation) hotel and restaurant. Prior to The American Hotel, the former residents of New York City had operated a respected bakery on the edge of the village for two years, The Rockville Cafe. The Rockville Cafe served as a community gathering spot for locals and visitors alike, and the open, welcoming atmosphere they fostered has helped to attract a diverse flow of new full-time and weekend residents to Sharon Springs. This influx includes many single-sex couples and their families, ethnic and social minorities, as well as authors, artists, artisans and entrepreneurs. Plummer and Roberts helped rebuild the diversity of Sharon Springs while restoring one of its landmark hotels. Their work continues into the 2000s, as they continue to restore other historical structures in the village, including their home on Pavilion Avenue as well as the shops and cafe across Main Street from the American Hotel.
Other structures from the same time period, such as The Roseboro, were acquired, stabilized, and made into a functioning source of commerce for the community. Dennis Giacomo, owner of the Roseboro, and Dawne Belloise, a former president of the Sharon Historical Society, saved the 150-room Roseboro from demolition and began a massive restoration. While never having been restored fully back to an operating hotel, the Roseboro Hotel did afford shop space and since 2000, has operated as a functioning restaurant, banquet and retail space.
One of the Giacomo/Belloise team's fully completed collaborations is the Klinkhart Homestead, the 1859 Italianate family home of a former proprietor of the Roseboro and prominent Sharon Springs citizen, which they restored in the late 1990s. They also fully restored the Brimstonia Cottage next door, which has been lodging visitors since 1997. Nearly a decade later, Giacomo brought back the large Victorian home adjacent to the Klinkhart Homestead, fully restoring it in 2003.
Ms. Belloise led a successful 1996 application to list the 177 structures in the village on the National Register of Historic Places as a mineral resort.[5] She also applied for and won a grant from the New York State Council for the Humanities to establish a self-guided walking tour through Sharon Springs in 1997. Today, one can still walk this tour by following the plaques that line Main Street which Belloise designed and installed. The historic photos and the informative text on these plaques help visitors and residents alike to imagine the extent of the town's grandeur in its spa heyday, as many mark structures that no longer stand today.
The boutique trade in bed and breakfast type inns has done particularly well for those properties situated to take advantage of the sweeping valley and rolling high geography of the community. In particular has been the magnificent although well aged Clausen Farm with its much expanded farm house from the the late 18th century, its Victorian stables and carriage barns and rare gentlemen's retreat a shingle style two story "casino", errected in 1892 with an open turret on the 3rd floor to afford wide views. The casino features its own 19th century kegelbahn, a German-style bowling alley.[6] The estate, acquired by Henry L Clausen Jr. a successful beer maker in 1890, served a Bed and Breakfast until the end of 2008. It had remained in the Clausen family (fifth generation) until 2009.
Two other historic Sharon Springs inns fully restored to their original state include the Edwardian Edgefield [1] at 153 Washington Street and the Victorian New Yorker B&B, at 110 Center Street.
Two arts venues in the village also operate out of fully restored structures. The Village Hall Galleries, at 187 Main Street, is run by proprietor and photographer, Leila Durkin. Ms. Durkin renovated the former fire house in 2009, relocating her art gallery from spaces further south on Main Street. Chartwell Studios, an operating artists studio offering drawing classes and gallery space showcasing local fine and decorative arts, operates out of a fully restored 1871 Victorian former drug store on Route 20. Peter Cozzolino and Marguerite MacFarlane won the 2007 Historic Preservation Award for Otsego and Schoharie Counties in the Rehabilitation category for their work on the Studios.[7]
A lifestyle brand, Beekman 1802, was founded in Sharon Springs in 2008 by Dr. Brent Ridge and New York Times bestselling author Josh Kilmer-Purcell. The business, which produces artisanal beauty, food, and decor products, has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue and on The Martha Stewart Show. A documentary television series about the couple and their farm business will air on Planet Green in 2009.
Grand but Uncertain Resort Plans
With a now growing if not thriving commercial district, there are great hopes with a recent multiple-business acquisition by a Korean-American investment group primarily-based in New York City. In late 2004, the group purchased the Adler Hotel, as well as the Columbia and Washington hotels. The Washington, which had partially collapsed, was later demolished. In addition the group purchased the functioning Imperial Baths which will serve as a key draw with their resort plans. All total the properties were acquired for $750,000[8]. The Baths operations were closed at the end of the 2005 season marking the first time since the early 1800s that the village did not have a mineral bath tourist trade [8].
The Adler Hotel on the northern edge of the village with its Spanish style architecture was the last great hotel built prior to the great depression. The five-story hotel opened in 1927, but closed after the 2004 summer season.
In April 2007 the Investment group ("Sharon Springs Inc.") held a press conference and outlined a $12 million plan to restore both the Imperial Baths and the Adler Hotel in an 18-month project and bring in a projected 700 visitors a day when they're completed. Harold Shin, project manager for Manhattan-based architectural firm DeArch LLC, described how the 150-room Adler would be restored, and how the Imperial Baths would include both traditional baths and modern spa facilities.[9] Those plans since 2007 have since expanded into "a possible $350 million plan to erect two 11-story hotels — including one with a helipad — a golf course, condominiums and a spa with a bathhouse and a day care center."[8]
That plan would require the recreation of the once highly scenic 18-hole golf course, the property of which is closely held by a village resident, which overlooked the sprawling Mohawk Valley. Per published reports the land owner has no interest in developing the golf course and would block any such attempts to do so.[10]
Construction, renovation and restoration of those properties were planned to start in earnest in 2008 according to the principle partner, Q Sung Cho. However with the expandion of the project no such work commenced as of June 2008 and the timeline for completion would be, once begun, between five to seven years.
New York State Grants
On January 15, 2008 it was announced that under New York State's $100 million Restore NY program, $500,000 was being allocated to Sharon Springs. The money is intended for the Pavilion Cottages.[11] Which is unrelated to the venture focused on the Adler Hotel and its partners.
This project will preserve and rehabilitate the last remaining portion of the historic Pavilion Hotel (Cottages), one the mineral spring resorts in this area during the 19th Century. The Pavilion Hotel itself has long since been razed. The Cottages are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as part of the Sharon Springs Historic District. The plan is to rehabilitate the approximately 9,000-square-foot cottage - once used to house employees of the Pavilion Hotel - into five three-bedroom condominiums for an estimated project cost of $1.3 million to $1.5 million. The condos, on a five-acre site, will then be sold at market rates in what local officials hope will be an effort to attract more residents and visitors to the village.[12]
On September 2, 2009 Restore New York / Empire State Development's Communities Initiative - Round 3 - announced they were granting $1,000,000 for The Imperial Spa by Sharon Springs Inc.[13] The project funding is anticipated to create 100 new jobs. The project aims to rehabilitate the historic Imperial Bathhouse (circa 1927) into a modern luxury spa. Further the project aims to re-establish Sharon Springs as a spa destination.
Per the Empire State Development press release: The rehabilitation will create spa and therapy areas of 41,200 square feet and 6,400 square feet for outdoor bathing facilities. The total renovated square footage, including amenities such as restaurants and gift shops, will be 50,000 square feet.[14]
Geography
Sharon Springs is located at 42°47′41″N 74°36′57″W / 42.79472°N 74.61583°W / 42.79472; -74.61583 (42.794783, -74.615946).[15]
According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of 1.8 square miles (4.7 km²), all of it land.
Sharon Springs is located on New York State Route 10 (Main Street) immediately north of US Route 20. Bowmaker Pond and Clausen Pond are two small lakes south of the village.
Demographics
As of the census[16] of 2000, there were 547 people, 204 households, and 130 families residing in the village. The population density was 299.5 people per square mile (115.4/km²). There were 270 housing units at an average density of 147.8/sq mi (57.0/km²). The racial makeup of the village was 97.62% White, 0.73% African American, 0.18% Native American, and 1.46% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.83% of the population.
There were 204 households out of which 30.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 52.9% were married couples living together, 6.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 35.8% were non-families. 29.9% of all households were made up of individuals and 12.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.42 and the average family size was 3.03.
In the village the population was spread out with 23.4% under the age of 18, 5.7% from 18 to 24, 27.1% from 25 to 44, 20.5% from 45 to 64, and 23.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females there were 89.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 83.0 males.
The median income for a household in the village was $37,969, and the median income for a family was $45,000. Males had a median income of $36,563 versus $28,125 for females. The per capita income for the village was $24,664. About 8.5% of families and 12.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 23.4% of those under age 18 and 4.3% of those age 65 or over.
References
- ^ New York Census estimates
- ^ Source: www.myamericanwar.com/battles/810710
- ^ "Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills," by David Stradling
- ^ Glenn Collins, "Fragile Recovery for Village of Spas," The New York Times, 30 August 2000.
- ^ Glenn Collins, "Fragile Recovery for Village of Spas," The New York Times, 30 August 2000.</
- ^ http://www.sptimes.com/2005/11/20/Travel/Where_hops_are_hip.shtml
- ^ Otsego Viewpoints, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2007
- ^ a b c Sharon Springs Journal - Where Water Rejuvenates the Soul, Can It Do the Same for a New York Town? - NYTimes.com
- ^ Story not found - StoryID: 580476 - Times Union - Albany NY
- ^ http://thefreemansjournal.com/labels/08-15-08.html
- ^ State grant to aid Sharon Springs - Page 1 - Times Union - Albany NY
- ^ http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2008/jan/22/0122_condogrant/
- ^ http://www.empire.state.ny.us/restoreNY/
- ^ http://www.thedailystar.com/local/local_story_246040047.html
- ^ "US Gazetteer files: 2000 and 1990". United States Census Bureau. 2005-05-03. http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/gazette.html. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
- ^ "American FactFinder". United States Census Bureau. http://factfinder.census.gov. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
External links
- Recent photographs of the Hotel Adler
- Beekman 1802 site
- Village of Sharon Springs, NY
- Sharon Springs Information
- Sharon Springs Chamber of Commerce
- Clausen Farms
- Albany Times Union April 13, 2007 "Sowing seeds to help village bloom"
- New York Times July 23, 2001 "A Faded Resort Lumbers to Life"
- New York Times August 26, 2000 "Fragile Recovery for Village of Spas"
- Albany Times-Union January 15, 2008 "State grant to aid Sharon Springs"
- New York Times June 5, 2008 "Like the Water, Grand Plans Buoy Spirits at a Vacation Spot From a Bygone Era"
- The Freeman's Journal August 8, 2008 "Stone Gem, Discovered Overgrown, Lives Again"
