Clifton Park: A Name from a Colonial Land Petition
Near Albany, New York
The Iroquois name for this land was Shenendehowa, meaning great plains, and it was Native land for generations before Dutch settlers began crossing the Mohawk River from Schenectady in the late sixteen hundreds. One of those early settlers, Nanning Harmansen, sent a letter to the colonial governor Lord Cornbury in seventeen oh seven requesting a land patent. In that letter, Harmansen asked that the patent be called Clifton Park, named for Cornbury himself. The governor granted it, and the name stuck.
Clifton Park remained rural farmland for most of its history. It formally separated from the Town of Halfmoon in eighteen twenty-eight, becoming the last town organized in Saratoga County. In the late twentieth century, with Interstate Eighty-Seven running through its center, Clifton Park transformed into one of the fastest-growing suburbs in the Capital Region, the Mohawk valley plain now covered with subdivisions where farms once spread to the horizon.
