Smallwood, NY

Smallwood is a hamlet and census-designated place in Sullivan County, New York, with 839 residents in the 2020 census. It occupies the southeastern part of the Town of Bethel and began in the 1920s as the vacation community Mountain Lakes. Developer A.N. Smallwood later gave the hamlet its name. Immigrants built many of the early-20th-century cabins in the 1930s, using wood milled on site and limestone quarried in the community for the fireplaces.

Mountain Lake remains the center of the neighborhood: a roughly 65-acre private lake held by the Smallwood Civic Association, with a beach, lodge, courts, playground, and ball field for members. Some homes are seasonal and others year-round, giving Smallwood the overlap of Catskills retreat and lived-in hamlet. The cabins give the hamlet its most recognizable texture. The development’s early membership rules were exclusionary, a history that changed as the community became more diverse. Smallwood is a New York community where log cabins, a private lake, local stone, and summer-country roads meet.