Fort Nassau, Fort Orange, and the Oldest Continuous Settlement

In sixteen fourteen, a Dutch trader named Hendrick Christiaensen built a small wooden stockade on an island in the Hudson River, just south of where the Mohawk enters from the west. He called it Fort Nassau. It was the first documented European structure in what would become Albany.

The river flooded it out four years later. So the Dutch tried again. In sixteen twenty-four, the Dutch West India Company established Fort Orange on the mainland, on higher ground where the city now stands.

It became the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland, and it never stopped being inhabited. That unbroken chain of continuous European settlement makes Albany one of the oldest continuously occupied European sites in the entire United States. Fort Orange was not really a fort in the military sense.

It was a trading engine. The great commodity was beaver. Tens of thousands of pelts per year moved through here by the sixteen thirties, bound for European hatmakers who could not get enough of the lustrous North American fur.

The Dutch acquired that fur from the Mohawk, who had muscled out the Mahican as the primary middlemen of the trade and enforced something close to a monopoly on access. The settlement that grew up around the fort was called Beverwyck. It was cosmopolitan almost immediately, Dutch, Scandinavian, German, English, all crammed into a few hundred souls trading and arguing and surviving together inside a palisade wall.

When England seized New Netherland in sixteen sixty-four, Governor Richard Nicolls renamed the fort and the settlement Albany, after James, Duke of York and Albany, who would later become King James the Second. Fort Orange became Fort Albany, Beverwyck became a city, and the river trade continued without missing a season.