Huguenot Street: The Oldest Authenticated Street in America

There is a short street in the village of New Paltz, New York, that has been continuously inhabited since sixteen seventy-eight, making it what scholars have recognized as the oldest authenticated street in the United States.

In sixteen seventy-seven, twelve Huguenot families, French-speaking Calvinist Protestants who had fled religious persecution in Louis the Fourteenth's France, negotiated a land purchase with the Esopus Munsee band of the Lenape people. They paid for nearly forty thousand acres along the Wallkill River and named the settlement New Paltz, after the Rhenish Palatinate, where many of them had found refuge before crossing the Atlantic. The following year they began building.

The houses they constructed along what is now Huguenot Street were built in limestone quarried from the nearby Shawangunk Ridge, using the thick-walled pièce-sur-pièce technique they had learned from Dutch and Flemish neighbors in the Hudson Valley. Unlike wood-frame construction, the stone survived. Seven of the original structures from the early seventeen hundreds still stand today, in their original locations, on their original foundations. These are not reconstructions or period reproductions. They are the actual buildings.

In nineteen sixty the National Park Service designated Huguenot Street a National Historic Landmark District. The thirty historic structures across ten acres represent an intact colonial streetscape that was occupied by the same family lines for generations, each household maintaining and modifying their ancestral home while the country around them was built and rebuilt entirely.

The founding families were also slaveholders, a fact that the historic district has increasingly addressed in its interpretation, naming the enslaved individuals documented in property records and acknowledging that the prosperity that preserved these houses rested partly on unfree labor. The street holds the whole story, not just the picturesque part.