Coxsackie: The Hoot-Owl Place on the Hudson

The name Coxsackie comes from the Mahican people who lived along this stretch of the Hudson River. Their word, rendered by Dutch settlers as Koxhackung, translates roughly as the place of many owls or the hoot-owl place. Dutch colonists established a presence here by sixteen sixty-one, trading with the Mahican before permanent European farms took hold.

By the early eighteen hundreds the village had become a busy river town. The Hudson was the highway, and Coxsackie shipped farm produce and harvested river ice to New York City. Shipbuilding, brickmaking, and iron foundries followed. A merchant named Eliakim Reed bought the waterfront property around eighteen ten and laid out a wharf and business district that grew quickly. The village incorporated in eighteen sixty-seven. Today Coxsackie is perhaps best known to most Americans not for its history but for a very different reason: scientists in Albany in the nineteen forties isolated the Coxsackievirus from patients in the area, and the pathogen carries the town's name to this day.