The Lakeville Historic District illustrates the development and evolution of Connecticut's rural industrial communities from the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries. Community leaders were all intimately associated with the site and its industrial, financial, transportation, and commercial institutions, including Cornelius Knickerbaker, Colonel Joshua Porter, tavernkeeper-postmaster Peter Farnham, the Holley family, lawyer John Hubbard, and industrialist Samuel Robbins. The district possesses industrial significance due to the fine surviving assemblage of mill buildings associated with the Holley Manufacturing Company, the involvement of several significant figures in local, state, and national history with industrial activities at this site, including Ethan Alien, Colonel Joshua Porter, Luther Holley, John Holley, and Alexander Holley, and the pivotal association of both the site and such individuals with important eras of American history, including development of the rural colonial iron industry before 1775, production of armaments during the American Revolution, and the water-powered factory-based Industrial Revolution of the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The district has transportation significance as the center of a regional transportation network which included early roads, turnpikes, and railroads. The district has commercial significance as the local business center within the larger community through concentration of economic institutions and activity there. The forge and furnace operations not only employed scores of workers, but also provided livelihoods for area miners, teamsters, and charcoal burners, while the Holley Manufacturing Company was the largest employer in mid-nineteenth-century Lakeville. The area's principal stores, recreational venues, financial institutions, and newspaper clustered there. Virtually all area businesses depended on services provided by the Lakeville passenger and freight stations.

Finally, the district has architectural significance because most of its buildings are well-preserved examples that embody distinctive characteristics of particular architectural periods and styles. These include the Federal-era Holley-Williams and Hubbard Houses, the Victorian Lakeville railroad station, the Italianate Holley Manufacturing Company mill and subsidiary buildings, and the Colonial Revival-style Salisbury Bank, E. E. Raynsford Carpentry Shop, and Lakeville Hose Company Fire Station. -NRHP Registration Form, 1996