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. 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.
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. 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."
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
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