Stockade Historic District

The Schenectady Stockade, founded by the Dutch on land purchased from the Mohawk Indians in 1661, is one of the oldest communities in America. It came under English rule three years later, and from its earliest days a timber stockade wall enclosed the settlement. In 1690, during the first of the colonial wars, a massacre and fire destroyed the village, but with the help of the Mohawks, settlers rebuilt it before the new century. In the eighteenth century, the village thrived through farming, fur trading, and boat building on the Mohawk River bank, and it became a commercial, transportation, and military center. Schenectadians contributed significantly to the development of the west and played an important role during the colonial wars and the Revolutionary War, after which the third stockade wall was removed. Union College, founded in 1795, was first located in the Stockade. In the nineteenth century, a disastrous fire in 1819 destroyed businesses near the Mohawk River, and several years later the Erie Canal shifted water transportation outside the old stockade boundaries, leading businesses to rebuild in a new part of town. Community life remained centered in the Stockade, which continued mainly as a residential area and retained a diverse architectural legacy of houses, churches, and public buildings. In 1962, the Schenectady Stockade became the first historic district in New York State, was established by the city as a legally protected historic zone under a state enabling act, and in 1973 was entered on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior.

Schenectady, New York · United States