Little Valley, New York  Little Valley is a town in Cattaraugus County, New York, United States. The population was 1,740 at the 2010 census. The town is named after its local geographical setting, a relative comparison of two tributaries (the other being the neighboring Great Valley) of the Allegheny River. The town of Little Valley is centrally located in the county, north of the city of Salamanca. The town contains a village also named Little Valley, which is the county seat. The first settlement was made around 1807 but was vacated due to frontier warfare in the War of 1812; settlement resumed in 1816, after the war ended. The town of Little Valley was formed in 1818 by splitting the town of Perry, which at the time covered the entire western half of the county. The northwest quadrant of the county became Perrysburg, while the southwest quadrant became Little Valley (also known as the town of Elkdale); at the same time, the town of Great Valley was split off from Olean, and the two towns' proximity and comparable topography gave the towns their names. Little Valley was once an important rail station on the Erie Railroad and notable for its cheese and dairy industry. The location of the railroad resulted in moving the county seat to the village of Little Valley, which was also later connected to Salamanca by a streetcar line. The towns of Conewango (1823), Napoli (1823), Mansfield (1830), New Albion (1830), and Bucktooth (1855, renamed Salamanca in 1864) were all formed from Little Valley. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , of which , or 0.02%, is water. New York State Route 242 and New York State Route 353 are major trunk roads through the town. They converge at Killborn Corners just east of the village of Little Valley. County Routes 88 (Baker Road) and 96 (Killborn Corners Road) act as bypasses. County Route 15 (Dublin Road), which picks up where Route 88 leaves off, continues northeast parallel to Route 242 between Little Valley and Ellicottville. County Routes 5 and 14 start in the northwest corner of the town and head toward New Albion and East Otto, respectively. The Pat McGee Trail, a hiking and snowmobile rail trail that follows the path of the now-removed railroad, runs through the town parallel to Route 353. The Conservation Trail, a subset of the Finger Lakes Trail (itself a subset of the North Country Trail), passes through the town connecting the state forests therein; the two trails share a roughly one-mile wrong-way concurrency in the town.