Castleton-on-Hudson: A Dutch River Landing
Near Albany, New York
In the sixteen hundreds, this stretch of the Hudson River's eastern bank was part of Rensselaerswyck, the vast Dutch patroonship granted to the Van Rensselaer family. Dutch farmers settled here on tenant leases, working the river bottomland and maintaining a dock on the Hudson. One early farmer, Johannes Van Buren, built a landing on the river that served the surrounding community.
By seventeen ninety, the heirs of those early settlers had hired a surveyor to lay out a proper village on the south end of what is now Main Street. When Robert Fulton's steamboat changed river travel after eighteen oh eight, Castleton's dock gave local farmers access to the growing markets of New York City. The village formally incorporated as part of Rensselaer County on April thirteenth, eighteen twenty-seven, with roughly one hundred residents. It eventually added on-Hudson to its name to distinguish it from Castleton, Vermont, in Rutland County, Vermont.
