China's agricultural and rural development has come into a new period of transformation since 2004, and this may provide new chances for rural development in less developed traditional agricultural areas. As such, geographical comprehensive studies on rural development in these areas are urgently needed. The Huang-Huai-Hai region, a representative of China's traditional agricultural areas, is an important hinterland of Bohai Economic Rim and a major base of China's grain and cotton production. The middle- and low-yield farmland improvement and agricultural comprehensive development initiated in the early 1970s had significantly accelerated the agricultural development in this region. Agricultural production function of this region has been further strengthened. However, rural development was still at a low level. This paper established an indicator system for assessing integrated level and spatial pattern of rural development in this region in 2000 and 2008 at county level. Furthermore, rural development types at county level were classified based on five indices including integrated rural development index, per capita output of major agricultural product, the proportion of agricultural labor in total rural labor, scale industrial output value per capita and the proportion of tertiary industry in GDP using self-organizing feature maps (SOFM) network modeling. The results showed: (1) rural development of the Huang-Huai-Hai region in 2008 has been significantly improved compared with 2000, as evidenced by the integrated rural development index showing an annual increase of 7.71%; (2) however, regional differences of integrated rural development index is still large and its spatial pattern showed no significant change during the study period; (3) per capita grain output and per capita output of major agricultural product have significant negative correlation with integrated rural development index and other selected rural development indictors; (4) according to cluster analysis supported by SOFM network, eight rural development types were divided. In urban-rural transformation, governments at all levels should identify limiting factors based on local conditions of various rural development types.Besides,more attention should be paid to the negative correlation between bulk agricultural commodities production and integrated rural development.