Stuyvesant Falls was shaped by Kinderhook Creek, whose seventy-foot drop powered textile mills and later the Albany-Hudson electric trolley line. An early woolen mill was established there in 1800 by William Van Hoesen, James Wardle built a stone cotton mill in 1827, and in 1841 Van Alen and Company bought that mill and built a brick mill beside it in 1845. By 1878 the Van Alen mill employed over two hundred workers and produced one hundred thousand yards of cotton cloth each week, and its successor, Frisbee Manufacturing Company, sold cloth to the US government during World War I. Textile production ended after the stock market crash of 1929. In 1900, the Albany and Hudson Railway and Power Company built a thirty-seven-mile rail line powered by an electrified third rail and constructed a hydroelectric generating plant at the Van Hoesen mill site, diverting water from the upper falls through four thousand two hundred-foot-long penstock tubes to spin turbines connected to generators, with steam power used during low water. The plant produced 12,000-volt, 25-cycle AC for the rail line through substations at Hudson, East Greenbush, and North Chatham, where it was stepped down to 600 volts and converted to DC, 600-volt DC for the rail line near the plant, and 2,200-volt, 60-cycle AC for streetlights in Hudson, Rensselaer, and communities along the line. After rail service ended in 1929, Niagara Mohawk Company continued generating electricity there until 1993, and after restoration by a private generating company in 2012, the plant now produces fifteen million kilowatt-hours a year.