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is a village in Schoharie County, New York, United States. The population was 547 at the 2000 census. The name is a combination of town and the important springs found by the village.
Sharon Springs, Kansas is its namesake, having been settled by people from New York.
The early village was a subordinate community to other prominent settlements in the town, such as Beekmans Corners and Leesville.
Sharon Springs set itself apart from the Town of Sharon in 1871 by incorporating as a village, and absorbed the neighboring community of Rockville during this process.
Thanks to its sulfur, magnesium, and chalybeate mineral springs, Sharon Springs grew into a highly fashionable spa during the 19th century. At its height, it was 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).
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.