History, Natural History & the Arts
America’s first President George Washington owned 316 acres of land in today’s Town of Kirkland, Oneida County, NY, in partnership with New York State’s first Governor George Clinton.
The Oneida Indian Nation lived in what is now Oneida County, even after the area’s settlement by Europeans, which started in the 1600s. The French traveled through the area in the 1500s. [Read more…] about George Washington’s Lands in Oneida County
New York’s canal building boom and the urban explosion that it triggered dramatically accelerated the dispossession and disruption of traditional life ways of the region’s Native American inhabitants that had been initiated by the introduction of European trade, diseases, colonial wars, the American Revolution, and encroaching settlement by non-natives. [Read more…] about The Erie Canal’s Impacts on Indigenous People
The canal system of New York State is a complex network of natural and man-made waterways that connect two of the Great Lakes that border the state with the Atlantic Ocean. The canals also incorporate Lake Champlain and the Finger Lakes. The development of this system bridges several generations and gives the canal system a genealogy of its own. [Read more…] about New York State’s Canal Heritage: An Engineering Family Tree
Fort Rickey was a small palisaded fortification that was initially constructed in ca. 1759 to support the British occupation of the Oneida Carry.
This strategic location at the confluence of the Mohawk River and Wood Creek was an important British military outpost that guarded the western end of the carry to Oneida Lake. It was the northern point of the Fort Stanwix Treaty Line of 1768. [Read more…] about Fort Rickey: On The Edge of Empires at Oneida Carry
Years of fighting land wars in the colonies had shaped American thinking around transporting large groups of people, a line of thought that led directly to the construction of the Erie Canal.
As American colonists pushed west, their efforts to connect people and products also resulted in considerable exploration and alteration of the land, some reflection on man-made impacts, and the production of maps, sketches, and more documents that help us tell the story of early New York State and the Erie Canal. [Read more…] about Maps and Geography: Early NYS Transportation History
In 2025, New York State commemorates the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo. This event was transformative for both the state and the nation, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean in an unprecedentedly efficient waterway.
During the bicentennial, we are offered an opportunity to reflect on two centuries of rich and complex history and discover how that period’s impacts allow us to explore and enjoy the Canal today. Here is some history, and tips for enjoying the canal. [Read more…] about 200 Years of Erie Canal History (1825-2025)
The ambitions of Albany and Troy for commercial supremacy in the nineteenth century illustrate clearly the varied pattern of the transportation history of the United States and furnish a striking example of intercity rivalry. Only a few struggles such as that between Tacoma and Seattle to become the eastern terminus of the transcontinentals can match the bitterness of the Troy – Albany feud. [Read more…] about Albany and Troy: 19th Century Commercial Rivals
Imagine the Mohawk River flowing with more force than Niagara Falls. Around 22,000 years ago, that’s exactly how it was. During the last ice age, the Laurentide Glacier began to melt, forming a large lake atop the glacier. As the glacier receded north, it opened access to the Mohawk River, which for thousands of years had been buried beneath the two-mile thick block of ice. Suddenly, all that lake water had somewhere to go.
The deluge of water that was released was so great that it carved an entirely new riverbed. It was so great in fact, that geologists gave the river a new name; the Iromohawk. Water rushed down the valley, carving away the cliffs of Clifton Park, the gorge at Cohoes, and the channel at Rexford. The river also curved back onto itself, creating the bend around Schenectady that the Mohawk follows today. [Read more…] about A Brief History of the Mohawk River
Stephen Van Rensselaer III (1764-1839), was orphaned at the age of ten. His father had died when he was five and his mother remarried Reverend Eilardus Westerlo, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany. She died five years later and Stephen was raised by Abraham Ten Broeck (later Brigadier General) and his wife (Stephen’s aunt) Elizabeth Van Rensselaer.
Stephen attended the John Water’s School in Albany, grammar school in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey and Classical School in Kingston. He then attended college at Princeton, but withdrew to Harvard because of the dangers in Northern New Jersey during the Revolutionary War. In 1776, Stephen’s grandfather Philip Livingston (who had married Ten Broeck’s sister Christina) had signed the Declaration of Independence. [Read more…] about Stephen Van Rensselaer III: The Last Patroon
On March 14, 2019 the French and Indian War fortification known as Fort Wood Creek was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Fort Wood Creek, located on the Rome Historical Society’s Fort Bull property, dates to 1756 when it was constructed by the British to replace Fort Bull after it had been attacked and destroyed by 362 French and their Native allies. [Read more…] about Fort Wood Creek Named to National Register
On July 4, 1817, at Rome, New York on a site now occupied by the Worthington Industries Steel plant, there was a ceremony allegedly turning the first spade of earth on the construction of the Erie Canal, one of the most important public works projects in history.
As we approach the Bicentennial of the Canal’s construction, we would do well to better understand this history and its importance. On July 2, 2017 there will be a march through Lower Manhattan sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Historical Association celebrating this event. [Read more…] about The Erie Canal, New York City, and Democratic Government
The Little Falls Journal and Courier proclaimed in a banner headline on their July 4th, 1916 edition that the celebration for the completion of Lock 17 “will go down in history.”
The paper stated that the pageantry and parades of the previous Friday and Saturday were a tremendous success. “Nothing so elaborate, so gorgeous, so successful from an historic, an artistic and idealistic point of view was ever before undertaken in this city… The crowd on Friday was conservatively estimated at four thousand and on Saturday it was as large or larger.”
Featured throughout the festivities were the recently arrived immigrant communities, the “New Americans” that Governor Whitman especially recognized in his remarks that Friday. [Read more…] about Little Falls’ Lock 17: An Engineering Marvel
During the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton served as an artillery captain and later a colonel and trusted aid to General George Washington. Colonel Aaron Burr also served in the Colonial Army and accompanied Benedict Arnold on his march through the Maine wilderness and his failed attempt to capture Quebec.
Burr had been with General Richard Montgomery when Montgomery was shot and killed in Quebec. Later in the war, Burr was placed in charge of a regiment and his troops were stationed in Westchester County, New York. [Read more…] about The Albany Connections of Burr, Hamilton, and Schuyler
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