Earlydays of Albany.

One more glance at your early history.  Three years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Fort Orange was erected, in the center of what is now the business part of the city of Albany; and, a few years later, the little hamlet of Beverswyck began to nestle under its walls.  Two centuries ago, my Albanian friends, this very year, and I believe this very month of August, your forefathers assembled, not to inaugurate an observatory, but to lay the foundations of a new church, in the place of the rude cabin which had hitherto served them in that capacity.  It was built at the intersection of Yonker’s and Handelaar’s, better known to you as State and Market streets.  Public and private liberality cooperated in the important work.  The authorities at the Fort gave fifteen hundred guilders; the patroon of that early day, with the liberality coeval with the name and the race, contributed a thousand; while the inhabitants, for whose benefit it was erected, whose numbers were small and their resources smaller, contributed twenty beavers “for the purchase of an oaken pulpit in Holland.”  Whether the largest part of this subscription was bestowed by some liberal benefactress, tradition has not informed us.

NewAmsterdam

Nor is the year 1656 memorable in the annals of Albany alone.  In that same year your imperial metropolis, then numbering about three hundred inhabitants, was first laid out as a city, by the name of New Amsterdam.[A] In eight years more, New Netherland becomes New York; Fort Orange and its dependent hamlet assumes the name of Albany.  A century of various fortune succeeds; the scourge of French and Indian war is rarely absent from the land; every shock of European policy vibrates with electric rapidity across the Atlantic; but the year 1756 finds a population of 300,000 in your growing province.  Albany, however, may still be regarded almost as a frontier settlement.  Of the twelve counties into which the province was divided a hundred years ago, the county of Albany comprehended all that lay north and west of the city; and the city itself contained but about three hundred and fifty houses.

[Footnote A:  These historical notices are, for the most part, abridged from Mr. Brodhead’s excellent history of New York.]

Twohundred years.

One more century; another act in the great drama of empire; another French and Indian War beneath the banners of England; a successful Revolution, of which some of the most momentous events occurred within your limits; a union of States; a Constitution of Federal Government; your population carried to the St. Lawrence and the great Lakes, and their waters poured into the Hudson; your territory covered with a net-work of canals and railroads, filled with life and action, and power, with all the works of peaceful art and prosperous enterprise with all the institutions which