In 1609, when explorer Henry Hudson reached the end of the river that bears his name, he found a thriving community of Mohican Indians on the site of present-day Albany. In 1624 Dutch settlers established a permanent trading community there to replace one that had burned ten years earlier, and they named it Fort Orange. The British captured the fort in 1664, renaming it Albany in honor of England's James, Duke of York and Albany. The resident Dutch were permitted to retain their own language and customs. Albany became a fur-trading center and a residence for owners of the ships that carried produce down the Hudson River to the Atlantic and on to the West Indies.
In 1754 Benjamin Franklin presented his Plan of Union, a forerunner of the U.S. Constitution, at Albany, earning the city its nickname of "Cradle of the Union." Following the American Revolution, the city served as a supply center for settlers heading west. Albany was declared the capital of New York State in 1797. Banking, iron manufacturing, and lumber trading enriched the city's economy during the nineteenth century and, with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the creation of the New York Central Railroad in 1853, Albany became an important commercial center as well.
By the early 1900s supplies of iron ore and lumber from the Adirondacks were dwindling, and Albany's industries declined. At the same time, the state of New York became increasingly important in national politics, with Albany nurturing such prominent figures as Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Thomas E. Dewey, and Nelson A. Rockefeller. By the 1980s government had become the city's chief activity.
Albany, despite its reliance on government as its primary economic sector, was affected by the economic downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted from a decline in the high technology sector. Gradually resurfacing through increased efforts at economic development and downtown restoration and beautification, the city recovered by the turn of the century. Republican George E. Pataki was first elected governor of New York in 1995 and was reelected to a third term in November 2002. Pataki, referred to as a catalyst for increasing New York's presence in the high technology industry, committed state funds totaling more than a billion dollars for research centers in support of this industry. Albany became the site for one of just six of these centers throughout the state, and the resulting Albany NanoTech, a university-based research facility that opened in 2003, promptly drew such high technology leaders as chip equipment manufacturer International Sematech. The first of many such partnerships, including those with Tokyo Electron Ltd. and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the Sematech deal was such a boon for the region that Governor Pataki stated that it " . . . could be the most important thing to happen to the upstate economy since the Erie Canal."
Historical Information: New York State Museum, Cultural Education Center, Room 3023, Albany, NY 12230; telephone (518)474-5877