Living in Dryden

Partial hamlets census

The Draft Comprehensive Plan actually defines four hamlets within the town, though Etna and Varna are the two most frequently discussed. The other two hamlets are fragments, one being the Dryden side of McLean, which is largely in the Town of Groton, and the other being a tract of land north of the Village of Dryden and east of Route 13.

Like Varna and Etna, these hamlets have no official standing with the Census Bureau, so I've had to make some estimates of which census blocks are in the hamlets, using the same techniques I used to collect census data for Etna and Varna.

In Figure 5-1 of the Draft Comprehensive Plan (301 KB PDF), the hamlet north of Dryden looks like the picture below. The "hamlet" portion this calculation is about is just the yellow.

The hamlet area north of Dryden, as defined in yellow by the Draft Comprehensive Plan.

A comparable area, defined in census blocks, is highlighted here:

Census blocks which include the hamlet north of the Village of Dryden as defined by the Draft Comprehensive Plan.

The Dryden portion of McLean is slightly more difficult, as most of southwestern McLean is one large (and not particularly dense) census block. In the Draft Comprehensive Plan, the Dryden portion of the McLean hamlet is highlighted in yellow:

The McLean hamlet area in the Town of Dryden, as defined in yellow by the Draft Comprehensive Plan.

A roughly comparable area, defined in census blocks, is highlighted here:

Census blocks which include the Town of Dryden portion of the hamlet of McLean as defined by the Draft Comprehensive Plan.

The westernmost block highlighted there contained 56 people, 19 households, and 20 housing units (only one of which was rental) in the 2000 census.

The results for these areas are given in the tables below. The population totals look like:

Population	McLean	Dryden Hamlet Area
Total	324	219
White	316	211
Black	6	6
American Indian/Eskimo	1	0
Asian	0	0
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander	0	0
Other	0	0
Multi-racial	1	2
Hispanic	2	0
Males	163	113
Females	161	106
Under 5	31	20
5 to 17	60	49
18 to 21	14	11
22 to 29	30	20
30 to 39	60	41
40 to 49	45	33
50 to 64	50	26
65 and up	34	19

Moving to households, we get:

Households	McLean	Dryden Hamlet Area
Total households	124	88
Household - 1 Male Only	7	11
Household - 1 Female Only	12	14
Married, Children	30	18
Married, No Children	42	16
Male Head of House, Child	8	5
Female Head of House, Child	13	11
Families	100	56

And looking at housing, we get:

Housing Units	McLean	Dryden HA
Total Housing Units	135	98
Vacant	11	10
Owner-Occupied	106	62
Renter-Occupied	18	26

As with Varna and Etna, there's an issue with mobile home parks and the distinction between owner- and renter-occupied. It's not entirely clear how the census accounts for mobile homes which are owned by their occupants but which are in a park with fees. So far as I can tell, these are counted as owner-occupied, not as rentals.

Posted by simonstl at March 6, 2004 12:25 PM
Note on photos