Fort Orange

Listen for a moment. Under the hum of traffic, the Hudson River is still moving past, wide and slow and brown-green, the way it has for thousands of years. The air near the water smells of wet stone and river mud. Cars rush along the elevated highway, and the ground carries their vibration up through your feet. Somewhere close to here, beneath concrete and asphalt, lies the oldest European settlement site in this part of North America.

This is the area of Fort Orange, a small Dutch trading post built in the 1620s. You will not find walls or towers here. You will not find a reconstructed gate. What remains is buried, and most of it sits under the roads you can hear around you. So this guide asks for a little imagination. Picture the riverbank without the highway, without the city, without the bridges. Picture a low, muddy shore, thick woods behind it, and canoes pulled up on the bank.

The story begins with the Dutch West India Company, a trading company chartered by the Dutch Republic. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch were interested in one thing above all along this river — beaver pelts. In Europe, beaver fur made fine felt hats, and those hats were in fashion. The upper Hudson was a meeting point for trade with Native peoples, and the Dutch wanted a permanent place to do business.

An earlier Dutch post had stood on an island in the river nearby, but floods made it hard to keep. Fort Orange was built on the mainland shore instead, around 1624. Its name honours the House of Orange, the leading family of the Dutch Republic. Among the first people to live here were families of Walloons — French-speaking Protestants from the southern Low Countries, in what is now Belgium. They came on a long Atlantic crossing to settle at a place most of them had never seen.

The fort itself was modest. Think of a compact enclosure of earth banks and timber, with a few houses and storehouses inside. It was not built to hold back an army. It was built to protect goods, to show a Dutch presence on the river, and to give traders a secure base. Inside, people lived close together. They cooked, stored furs, kept accounts, and waited for the trading season.

The real power here was not Dutch alone. The fort stood in the homelands of the Mahican people, and the Mohawk, one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, lived to the west. Here is something many visitors miss. These Native nations were not just suppliers of furs. They were the people who decided the terms of trade, and they had their own rivalries, alliances and goals. In the early years, the Dutch traders depended on them completely.

What did the Dutch offer in return? Cloth, especially heavy woollen duffel cloth. Metal tools, kettles, axes and knives. Glass beads in many colours. And, over time, firearms. Each exchange changed lives on both sides. Native communities took up European goods and gave them new uses. A copper kettle might be cut into ornaments or arrowheads. The Dutch, in turn, learned the river routes, the seasons of the hunt, and the protocols of diplomacy.

Now for a surprise. For most of the twentieth century, people assumed the remains of Fort Orange had been lost forever. The city had grown over the site. Then, around 1970, construction began on the highway that now runs along the river here. Archaeologists, led by Paul Huey of the New York State historic preservation office, were able to dig at the site before the roadwork covered it. They found that a great deal had survived underground.

The excavation recovered thousands of objects. There were fragments of Dutch pottery and painted tiles, glass beads, clay tobacco pipes, and traces of the buildings inside the fort. These finds gave historians a direct look at daily life in the earliest years of the colony. Think about that as you stand here. The material under these roads is some of the most important evidence of early Dutch America ever found, and it came to light only because a highway was being built.

The fort did not stay alone for long. North of its walls, a small town grew up, which the Dutch came to call Beverwijck — a name that means something like beaver district. Around the fort lay a huge private estate called Rensselaerswyck, held by a merchant from Amsterdam. There was often tension between the company's fort and the estate's managers over land, trade, and who held authority. The town of Beverwijck was partly an answer to that quarrel.

In 1664, the English took over New Netherland, the Dutch colony along this river. The Dutch town here was renamed Albany, after the English Duke of York and Albany, and the fort received a new name too. But the old riverside fort was low, damp and easily flooded. Within a few years, a new fort was built on the hill above the town, and the old post near the river was left to decay. The river and the city slowly covered it.

Yet the Dutch did not disappear when the flags changed. Dutch language, Dutch church life, and Dutch family names continued in Albany for generations. If you walk uphill into the city, you will notice names and traditions that trace back to these first decades. The modern city grew directly out of the small community that gathered around this muddy trading post, and that link is one reason Albany counts itself among the oldest European-founded cities in the United States.

So what can you actually do here today? Look for the historic markers that note the site of the fort. Walk toward the river if you can, perhaps to the riverfront park, where the water is closer and the highway noise drops a little. From the riverbank, look north and south along the Hudson. This is the view that traders, settlers and Native travellers shared. The shape of the river is much the same, even if everything around it has changed.

Before you go, take a last look at the concrete above and around you. It is easy to think of history as something kept in museums, behind glass. Here it lies just a few metres underfoot, under roads that thousands of people drive across every day without knowing. Listen again to the river, and to the traffic. Both sounds belong to this place now. And as you walk away, remember that the city around you began right here, at the water's edge.