Dutch settlers colonized the Hudson River Valley in the first half of the 1600s, and the Valatie Kill took its name, pronounced vah-lay-sha, from the Dutch words vaal, je, and kill, roughly meaning little falls stream. Its waters rise on the Rensselaer Plateau north of Nassau Lake, flow south through Kinderhook Lake to the Village of Valatie to meet Kinderhook Creek, and then join Stockport Creek, a tributary of the Hudson River. The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail follows the Valatie Kill for ten miles from Nassau Lake to Valatie. In the early 1800s, European settlers cleared most Hudson Valley forests for farms and shipped agricultural products to New York City by way of the Hudson River, but the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the rapid spread of railroads brought Midwestern farm products into eastern U.S. markets, contributing to the abandonment of many Columbia and Rensselaer County farmlands and the reforestation of over half the region. Today the woodlands differ greatly from the precolonial old-growth forest: American chestnuts, once valued by Native Americans for food and timber, were devastated by a blight introduced in the early 1900s; ash trees are now being killed by the invasive emerald ash borer; climate change is favoring red oak and red maple while yellow birch, sugar maple, and red spruce decline. The Kinderhook Creek watershed also supports the rare brook snaketail dragonfly, whose presence indicates high water quality and whose survival depends on undisturbed fields and woodlands. The Valatie Kill fed Wild's Pond in Valatie, which was dammed for mills in the 1820s and later regarded as scenic. In the greater Kinderhook Creek watershed, the eastern box turtle inhabits forests and fields near water, can live thirty to forty years or more, and is declining in New York because of automobiles, agricultural machinery, and land development. The Albany-Hudson Electric Trail also follows a former trolley line that ran from 1900 to 1929, crossing the Valatie Kill five times on new bridges installed where the original ones had long since been removed.