THE RISE, FALL AND REBIRTH OF AN AMERICAN CITY

By P. Thomas Carroll, PhD, Executive Director, Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway and RiverSpark Heritage Area

Troy goes back over two centuries. Indeed, the community on the eastern shore of the Hudson River nine miles north of Albany has been called Troy since a cold winter evening in 1789. On that night, a small number of residents gathered in Ashley’s Tavern at the foot of what is now Ferry Street and decided to change the little hamlet’s name from “Vanderheyden’s Farm” to the name it has had ever since. In doing so, they were changing its destiny from the fertile land occupied first by Mohicans and then by three branches of the Vanderheyden family into what can be considered the Silicon Valley of the nineteenth century. Because it was ideally situated near the northernmost navigable reaches of the Hudson River, and at the easternmost end of the Erie Canal once it opened in 1825, Troy was ideally suited for transportation and commerce in an era when water was the dominant form of transport. In addition, it was blessed with substantial falling water over its 200-foot bluffs, providing the superior form of power in those days for industrial mills. That rare combination in one small space allowed the community to flourish, growing by leaps and bounds from a tiny hamlet in the 1780s to almost 80,000 at its peak in 1910, making it something like the Austin, Texas, of its day. Commerce and industry both skyrocketed, so that by the time of the 1840 Census, Troy was the fourth wealthiest city in the nation on a per capita basis.

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In this article:
The rise and fall
Center of innovation
A new revival