Albany County, New York
The city of Albany was the first municipality within this large county, founded as the village (dorp in Dutch) of Beverwyck by the Director-General of New Amsterdam, Pieter Stuyvesant, who also established the first court in Albany. Albany was established as a city in 1686 by Governor Dongan through the Dongan Charter after the English took over the colony. Schenectady to the west was given a patent with some municipal rights in 1684 and became a borough in 1765.
History of Albany, New York (1784–1860)
The era of turnpikes in Albany started with the incorporation of the Great Western Turnpike Company in 1799. The Great Western Turnpike (today Western Avenue and US Route 20) connected Albany with the Finger Lakes and eventually Lake Erie at the site of Buffalo. Various other corporations soon started to connect Albany to various places: Lebanon Springs in 1799, Schenectady in 1801, Bethlehem in 1804, Albany and Delaware in 1805. In 1803 the second bank chartered in Albany, the New York State Bank, opened. In 1807, Robert Fulton initiated a steamboat line from New York to Albany; this was the first commercially viable steamboat in the world.