Kingston: New York's Forgotten First Capital

Albany gets the credit, and Albany is the capital today, but Kingston was first.

In the spring of seventeen seventy-seven, with British forces in control of New York City and the outcome of the Revolution entirely uncertain, the newly declared State of New York needed a capital that was defensible and distant from the occupied city. The delegates chose Kingston, a Dutch colonial town on the west bank of the Hudson, fifty miles south of Albany, where the Esopus Creek meets the river. In April of that year, the New York State Constitution was adopted in the Kingston Courthouse. The Senate met in one building; the Assembly in another. The legislature of an independent state conducted its first business in the stone buildings of a town that Dutch settlers had first occupied in the sixteen fifties.

Six months later, the British burned it.

In October seventeen seventy-seven, General John Vaughan sailed a British fleet upriver from Manhattan in retaliation for American operations at Saratoga, where Burgoyne had just surrendered. Vaughan's forces landed, marched into Kingston, and set the town on fire. Nearly every building in the Stockade District was destroyed. The legislators fled north toward Albany, which then became the capital.

Kingston rebuilt. The stone buildings of the Stockade District, reconstructed on their original foundations, are the oldest surviving urban neighborhood in New York State. Some date to Dutch settlement in the sixteen fifties. You can walk through them today.

To the south of the Stockade District, at the Rondout Creek landing where it meets the Hudson, a different story: the Delaware and Hudson Canal emptied into the Hudson River at Kingston from eighteen twenty-eight to eighteen ninety-eight, making Rondout the third-largest port on the Hudson River. Coal came down from the Pennsylvania mines, through the mountains on mule-drawn barges. The Hudson River Maritime Museum preserves the oral history of the tugboat workers who ran that commerce. They are the other history of Kingston, the one that came after the constitution.