History:
Manchester Village represents a rural Village which has changed into a leisure and retirement oriented community over the past century and a half. The architecture of the Village presents an unusually complete and well preserved record of the development of a resort community between 1850 and 1925.

From 1761 to 1850, the Village was primarily a crossroads featuring numerous taverns and inns. From 1850 to about 1900 the Village entered its resort phase with the most notable contributor being the Equinox Hotel. The cities of the Northeast were growing explosively. The population of New York exceeded one million by the 1850s and it had become a noisy, dirty, and unhealthy place. Attracted by the very lack of development which so discouraged Manchester's citizens, tourists and seasonal residents began to appear in numbers in Manchester in the 1850s. From 1900 to the present, the Village evolved into a mixed resort and retirement community.