Mechanicville - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

MECHANICVILLE, a village of Saratoga county, New York, U.S.A., on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 20 m. N. of Albany; on the Delaware & Hudson and Boston & Maine railways. Pop. (1900), 4695 (702 foreign-born); (1905, state census), 5877; (1910) 6,634. It lies partly within Stillwater and partly within Half-Moon townships, in the bottom-lands at the mouth of the Anthony Kill, about 1 z m. S. of the mouth of the Hoosick River. On the north and south are hills reaching a maximum height of 200 ft. There is ample water power, and there are manufactures of paper, sash and blinds, fibre, &c. From a dam here power is derived for the General Electric Company at Schenectady. The first settlement in this vicinity was made in what is now Half-Moon township about 1680. Mechanicville (originally called Burrow) was chartered by the county court in 1859, and incorporated as a village in 1870. It was the birthplace of Colonel Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth (1837-1861), the first Federal officer to lose his life in the Civil War.