New Paltz: Three Centuries on One Street

The town of New Paltz, sitting in the shadow of the Shawangunk Ridge, is one of those places where the founding is not a distant abstraction. It is still standing, still visitable, preserved in stone along a single short street.

In sixteen seventy-seven, twelve Huguenot families, French-speaking Calvinist Protestants who had fled religious persecution in France, purchased nearly forty thousand acres from the Esopus Munsee, a band of the Lenape people. They named the settlement after an earlier refuge in the German Palatinate, the Pfalz, where they had sheltered before crossing the Atlantic. The following year they built their first homes along what is now Huguenot Street, using locally quarried limestone in the Dutch-Flemish construction style they had learned in the Hudson Valley.

Those houses are still there. Seven stone structures from the early seventeen hundreds stand in their original locations, making Huguenot Street what the National Register has recognized as the oldest authenticated street in America. Unlike many preserved colonial sites, these are not reconstructions or transplants. They are original buildings, on their original foundations, owned and occupied by the same family lines for generations before preservation societies existed.

A classical school opened in New Paltz in eighteen twenty-eight, and the state established a normal school there in eighteen eighty-five to train teachers. It eventually became the State University of New York at New Paltz, now a campus of about seven thousand students that sits just a few blocks from those limestone houses. Students walk between centuries on the same sidewalk.

The juxtaposition is the point of New Paltz: a Huguenot refuge that became a college town, where the oldest street in America and a working university share the same valley floor beneath the Gunks.