TROY CITY, seat of justice for the county, lies on the east side of the Hudson, 6 miles north of Albany, at the junction of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys.  There is some reason to believe that its present site was visited by Hudson, the first navigator of Hudson river, in 1609.  In the record of his voyage, it is stated he "went sounding his way above the highlands, till at last the Crescent, (the ship in which he made his voyage, ) had sailed beyond the city of Hudson, and a boat had advanced a little beyond Albany."  Probably this boat ascended to the rifts which lay at the northerly part of the city, where the ordinary tides spent their force, and the navigation was interrupted.

For more than a century after Hudson's voyage, the territory now comprising the site of Troy, (although within the limits of the grant made to the patroon,) probably remained part of the hunting ground of the Mohawk Indians.  In 1720, a grant of 490 acres, extending along the Hudson between the Poestenkill and Meadow creeks, comprehending the original allotments on which the city was erected, was made in fee by the proprietor of the manor of Rensselaerwyck to Derick Van Derheyden, at the small rent of three bushels and three pecks of wheat and four fat fowls annually.  From the date of the grant, and possibly from a period of little earlier, this plain and the first range of hills adjoining, was possessed by the grantee and his descendants, and small portions of it cultivated as a farm.

After the revolution, emigrants from New England, seeing the advantageous situation of Van Derheyden, as it was then called, induced the proprietors to lay it out into town lots.  At this period Lansingburg, then called the "New City," was a village of considerable size and commercial importance; the city of Albany lay a few miles to the south, and had for many generations been the centre of trade for the entire country around.  These circumstances at the first appeared unpropitious to the growth of this place.  The establishment of the Federal government in 1789, and the settlement of the "new state" of Vermont, gave an impulse to the spirit of enterprise.  The village of Van Derheyden being at the head of the natural navigation of the Hudson, after some struggle began to outstrip the "New City," which had been unwisely located above the rifts.  The earliest surveys of the three allotments into which the site was originally divided, were made between the years 1786 and 1790; one or two slight buildings in 1786, and a small number of the two years following.  It is stated that by the spring of 1789, five small stores and about a dozen dwelling houses had been erected.  The appellation of Van Derheyden's Ferry was now changed into the more classic name of TROY.    John W. Barber, Henry Howe, 1844