9 Oldest Founded Towns To Visit In Upstate New York
The Dutch built their first North American fur-trading fort on the upper Hudson River in 1614 and an entire string of upstate New York towns grew up around the trade routes that followed. Albany received its charter in 1686 and has been continuously operating as a city longer than any other municipality in the United States. Saratoga Springs grew up around mineral-spring beds Mohawks had used for centuries before European contact. Buffalo became a Great Lakes shipping capital after the Erie Canal opened in 1825. Seneca Falls hosted the first women's rights convention in U.S. history in 1848. The nine upstate towns ahead each preserve a different piece of pre-Revolutionary and early-American history.
Albany
Albany is the longest continuously chartered city in the United States, with the Dongan Charter signed by Governor Thomas Dongan in 1686 still serving as the operating charter today. The Dutch built Fort Nassau on the Hudson River in 1614 and then Fort Orange on the river's west bank in 1624 (the actual archaeological remains of Fort Orange were rediscovered under modern Albany in 1970). The Beverwyck settlement that grew up around Fort Orange was renamed Albany in 1664 after the English took New Netherland. The city became New York's state capital in 1797 (succeeding Poughkeepsie). The Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site on Catherine Street, built in 1761 for General Philip Schuyler, hosted the wedding of Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler in 1780 and is open for tours. Historic Cherry Hill, the 1787 home of the Van Rensselaer family, holds five generations of original family contents and is unusual in that it operated as a private home until 1963.
Utica
Utica sits in the Mohawk Valley about 90 miles west of Albany with around 65,000 residents. Fort Schuyler, built here in 1758 during the French and Indian War on the site of the present downtown, served as a defensive stronghold protecting the western approach to Albany. The settlement was renamed for Utica, Tunisia, the ancient Phoenician city, by drawing the name from a hat at Bagg's Tavern in 1798. The Stanley Theatre on Genesee Street, opened in 1928 as a Mexican Baroque-style movie palace and now restored as a performing arts center, hosts the Mohawk Valley Ballet and touring Broadway productions. The Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute on Genesee Street holds a Philip Johnson-designed museum (the architect's first museum commission, completed in 1960) and a permanent collection including the Thomas Cole landscape The Voyage of Life series.
Troy
Troy sits on the east bank of the Hudson River across from Watervliet in the Capital District, with about 51,000 residents. The city was named in 1789 for the ancient Anatolian city of Homer's Iliad at a town meeting. Samuel Wilson, a Troy meatpacker who supplied the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, is the historical figure behind "Uncle Sam"; he is buried in Oakwood Cemetery on the city's eastern hills. Downtown Troy holds one of the densest concentrations of intact 19th-century commercial architecture in the Northeast, with most of the Antebellum and Gilded Age streetscape preserved (the city's industrial decline in the 20th century unintentionally preserved buildings that wealthier cities tore down). The Hart-Cluett Museum at 57 Second Street, an 1827 Greek Revival townhouse, runs as the local history museum. The Troy Farmers Market on Saturday mornings is one of the largest year-round farmers markets in upstate New York.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam, on the Mohawk River about 33 miles northwest of Albany, was originally called Veedersburgh after the Dutch settler Albert Veeder, who built one of the first mills here in the 1750s. The town was renamed Amsterdam in 1804 for the Dutch capital. The Guy Park State Historic Site on Main Street, built in 1773 for Sir Guy Johnson (a British Indian agent and son-in-law of Sir William Johnson), is one of the best-preserved pre-Revolutionary Mohawk Valley estates and is open for tours; it sits on the original portage path used by Mohawk traders. The Walter Elwood Museum holds the largest collection of Beech-Nut packaging artifacts in the region (the food company was Amsterdam-based for most of the 20th century). The Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor runs directly through downtown along the Mohawk.
Saratoga Springs
Saratoga Springs grew up around the mineral-water beds the Mohawk and Iroquois used for centuries before European contact (the local name "Sa-ragh-to-ga" translates roughly as "place of swift water"). Sir William Johnson, the British Indian agent, became the first recorded European visitor in 1771 when local Mohawks brought him here to drink the waters as treatment for his war wounds. The village was incorporated in 1826 and became a city in 1915, growing during the 19th century into the largest mineral-spa resort in North America. The Saratoga Race Course on Union Avenue, opened in 1863, is the oldest continuously operating thoroughbred racetrack in the United States. Saratoga National Historical Park sits about 12 miles southeast of the city and preserves the actual ground where the 1777 Battles of Saratoga turned the Revolutionary War; the surrender at Schuylerville marked the first major British defeat and brought France into the war on the American side.
Buffalo
Buffalo, the second-largest city in New York State with around 277,000 residents, was settled in the 1790s and grew into a major commercial hub after the Erie Canal opened in 1825 with Buffalo as its western terminus. The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Darwin D. Martin House complex on Jewett Parkway, built between 1903 and 1905, is considered Wright's masterwork from his Prairie period and underwent a $50 million restoration completed in 2017. Forest Lawn Cemetery, opened in 1849, holds the graves of President Millard Fillmore (who lived in Buffalo until his death in 1874) and around 152,000 others across 269 acres. Buffalo City Hall, completed in 1931 as one of the largest Art Deco municipal buildings in the country, runs free public tours of its observation deck on the 28th floor. The city was also the site of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, where President William McKinley was assassinated at the Temple of Music; the site is now a residential neighborhood.
Victor
Victor, in Ontario County about 22 miles southeast of Rochester, sits on land that was once the major Seneca village of Ganondagan, the largest Iroquois Confederacy town of the 17th century with around 4,500 residents. Ganondagan State Historic Site, on the edge of present-day Victor, preserves the village's site with a reconstructed Seneca bark longhouse (the only such reconstruction in the country) and the Seneca Art & Culture Center, which opened in 2015. The French expedition under the Marquis de Denonville burned Ganondagan in 1687 during the Beaver Wars between French Quebec and the Iroquois Confederacy, an event that reshaped colonial-era power in the western Great Lakes. The town of Victor itself was founded in 1812. The annual Ganondagan Native American Festival each July brings several thousand visitors and indigenous performers to the village site.
Auburn
Auburn, the Cayuga County seat at the north end of Owasco Lake, has around 26,500 residents and was settled in 1793. The Harriet Tubman National Historical Park on South Street, designated in 2017, preserves the home where the abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor lived from 1859 until her death in 1913, plus the Tubman Home for the Aged she founded in 1908. The William H. Seward House Museum on South Street, the 1816 home of Lincoln's Secretary of State who purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 (the deal was widely mocked at the time as "Seward's Folly"), holds the family's original furnishings and Civil War-era correspondence. The Cayuga Museum of History and Art holds the original Case Research Lab Museum, where Theodore Case developed the first commercially viable sound-on-film system in the 1920s. Fort Hill Cemetery includes a 56-foot stone monument to the Cayuga chief Logan, a Mingo leader of the Indigenous Confederacy.
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls hosted the first women's rights convention in U.S. history at the Wesleyan Chapel on July 19 and 20, 1848. The convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who lived at 32 Washington Street in Seneca Falls) and Lucretia Mott, produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto modeled on the Declaration of Independence demanding voting rights and legal equality for women. Women's Rights National Historical Park, designated in 1980, preserves the Wesleyan Chapel, the Stanton House, and a visitor center with extensive exhibits on the suffrage movement that grew from this site. The town was named for the falls of the Cayuga-Seneca Canal at the centre of the village, and the surrounding Cayuga people of the Iroquois Confederacy were displaced after the Sullivan Expedition of 1779. The film It's a Wonderful Life is widely believed to have been inspired by Seneca Falls; the town hosts an annual It's a Wonderful Life Festival each December at the bridge that supposedly inspired Bedford Falls.
Upstate's Foundational Nine
The nine towns above each preserve a different piece of pre-Revolutionary and early-American history. Albany holds the country's oldest continuously operating municipal charter. Saratoga Springs sits on water beds that drew Native American visitors for centuries before European contact. Seneca Falls launched the women's rights movement. Buffalo, Utica, Troy, Amsterdam, and Auburn run the canal-era industrial corridor along the Mohawk and Hudson. Victor anchors the site of the largest Seneca village in 17th-century North America. Together they form the back-end story of how New York grew into the Empire State.
