There is a building on Main Street in Hamburg with the words Bank of Hamburgh on it. That final H is not a typo, and it is not decoration. The village officially dropped it in 1877. The bank went up in 1907 and kept it anyway, thirty years after everyone else had moved on.
Two blocks of Main Street are like that. You can read the whole village off the storefronts if you know what the dates mean.
Smith's Corners, then Hamburgh, then Hamburg
Joseph Ellicott's surveyors came through in 1798. The Town of Hamburg was created by the state legislature on March 20, 1812, split off from the old town of Willink, and held its first meeting that April in Jacob Wright's tavern. The name comes from Hamburg, Germany, fitting enough for a place where New England settlers arrived first and German farm families followed in the 1830s.
The village center started as Smith's Corners, after the Smith brothers who built a grist mill there in 1811. The Village of Hamburg incorporated in 1874, with George M. Pierce as its first president. Three years later the spelling changed from Hamburgh to Hamburg. Pierce shows up again in 1881, selling land to the Erie County Agricultural Society, the parcel that became the Erie County Fairgrounds. Small village, short list of names.
What the historic district actually is
The Hamburg Downtown Historic District went on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. It covers two blocks of Main Street and takes in 62 contributing buildings (commercial blocks, churches, houses, and government buildings) built across roughly a century, from about 1870 to 1967.
That end date matters more than it looks. Most historic districts stop at the Depression or the war. Hamburg's runs into the 1960s because the village kept building on the same two blocks instead of abandoning them for a plaza out on the highway, and the 1960s work is counted as part of the story rather than damage to it. A downtown that never emptied out is rarer than a downtown that's old.
Six buildings and what they tell you
- First Baptist Church: the National Register listing dates the building to about 1870. A 2008 village walking-tour marker at 116 Main puts the structure in the 1830s and the congregation's founding in 1810. Sources disagree; the congregation is the older of the two either way.
- Bank of Hamburgh, 1907, with a major renovation in 1967. The obsolete spelling, carried forward on purpose.
- Walters Building, 1917: 79 Main, built with a meat market in it. 1917 was a bad year on this street: the B. M. Fish dry goods store burned, and the Hotel Hamburg was built on the ruins.
- People's Bank, 1926, reworked in 1966. Two banks two blocks apart is what a village looks like when the farms around it are doing well.
- St. James United Church of Christ, 1928: the congregational descendant of the German families who arrived a century earlier.
- Hamburg Presbyterian Church, 1952: postwar, and proof the district didn't stop growing when the photographs turned to color.
Why anything got built here at all
Two things. The first was the fair. From 1868 on, one week a year, a village of a few thousand people had to feed and house a crowd many times its own size, and Main Street was where that money landed.
The second was electricity. Two trolley lines connected Hamburg to Buffalo in 1900 and 1901, which meant a person could live here and work there, the first version of the commute a good share of the Southtowns still makes. The commercial buildings that followed weren't built for a farm village. They were built for a suburb that hadn't been invented yet.
The Hamburg Free Library opened in 1897. The Palace Theatre on Buffalo Street opened January 14, 1926. The post office at 56 Main is a 1936 WPA building, Federal in style, from the years when the federal government built things that were meant to look permanent.
How to see it
Park once and walk. Two blocks is nothing. Look above the first floor, which is where the original brickwork, cornices, and dates survive. Ground-floor storefronts get replaced every generation, and the second story is where the building tells the truth. The Grange Building's metal facade dates to 1890. The Kronenberg Building at 12 Main is 1884, with a peaked roofline someone paid extra for.
The Hamburg Historic Preservation Commission put up interpretive markers in 2008, including a walking-tour marker that names fifteen structures. They are free, they are outdoors, and nobody will ask you to buy anything.
Wear it
The Hamburg Main Street tee is the street, not a single building, because the point of this place is the run of them, sixty-two buildings that never got knocked down for parking.
It's part of the ALL America City collection: one real Western New York landmark per shirt. The other two Hamburg designs are the Erie County Fairgrounds and Eighteen Mile Creek. Everything else is in the full town-by-town guide.
Hamburg Downtown Historic District, Main Street, Village of Hamburg, New York. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.