Fort Orange: Where Albany Began
Near Albany, New York
In sixteen twenty-four, a ship carrying thirty Protestant Walloons, French-speaking settlers from what is now southern Belgium, arrived in the territory the Dutch West India Company called New Netherland. Eighteen of those settlers were sent north up the Hudson River to build a trading post near the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. They named it Fort Orange, after the House of Orange, the ruling family of the Netherlands. That post is the direct ancestor of the city of Albany.
Fort Orange was the northernmost outpost of Dutch colonial activity and the commercial center of the entire colony's most valuable trade: beaver furs. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, particularly the Mohawk, controlled access to the interior hunting grounds, and Fort Orange became the primary node where indigenous traders and Dutch merchants exchanged pelts for European goods. Without that relationship, and without the extraordinary productivity of the North American beaver population, the colony would not have been viable.
The fort itself was small, a simple earthwork enclosure on the western bank of the Hudson. Over four decades of Dutch occupation, it evolved from a bare trading waypoint into a small town called Beverwyck, with private homes, churches, a brewery, and a court. The social world was surprisingly diverse from early on. Dutch, Walloon, German, and English settlers lived alongside Haudenosaunee trading partners, and the colonial records document marriages, disputes, and commercial relationships across those boundaries.
On September twenty-fourth, sixteen sixty-four, the Dutch formally surrendered to the English. Fort Orange was renamed Fort Albany the following day. The Dutch returned briefly in sixteen seventy-three but gave up their North American claims permanently in sixteen seventy-four. The fort itself fell into disuse and was absorbed into the expanding city.
The site now lies beneath downtown Albany, an archaeologically significant buried colonial site, designated a National Historic Landmark. Excavations over the decades have recovered artifacts that document the early fur-trade world in extraordinary detail.
