Erie Canal Capital Region / Eastern Gateway

Troy

Approx. Mile -4–0 along the Erie Canal

Tidewater Hudson — the river gateway below Erie mile 0; a federal lock lifts boats toward the canal. Which canal is this? →

Troy is where the Hudson stops behaving like a river and starts behaving like a canal. The Troy Federal Lock and Dam, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers structure spanning the river from Troy on the east bank to Green Island on the west, marks the upper end of the Hudson River estuary — the furthest reach of tidal influence. This is the head of tide: below it, the river breathes with the ocean; above it, you are climbing.

For a boater bound west, Troy is the last tidal stop and the true gateway, though not quite the starting line. The Erie Canal officially has no "Lock 1"; the canal proper begins a few miles upstream at Waterford, where Lock E-2 opens the famous flight. The Federal Lock is the unofficial start — a prologue lock before the canal's real work begins.

What makes Troy worth the tie-up is what waits ashore: a restored working waterfront at the Downtown Marina and Riverfront Park, one of the best-preserved 19th-century commercial streetscapes in the Northeast, and an industrial-revolution history dense enough to fill an afternoon. Provision here, walk the old city, then go make your climb.

The city that armed and dressed a nation

Troy is not on the Erie Canal — and that is exactly the point. The true canal begins a few miles upstream at Waterford, where Lock E2 lifts boats into the Mohawk. Troy sits below it on the tidal Hudson, at the head of tide: the Troy Federal Lock and Dam, thrown across the river from Troy to Green Island by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and opened in 1916, marks the furthest reach of the ocean’s pull up the river. Above it the water runs fresh and man-made; below it, twice a day, the Atlantic still climbs 150 miles inland to lap at the city’s docks. For a boater bound west, Troy is the last tidewater stop and the doorstep of the whole 360-mile story — and if the difference between a canal and a canalized river needs sorting out, start with Which canal is this?

What makes the doorstep worth a long look is what Troy did with that tidewater. Deep-water ships reached it from New York Harbor, canal boats from the west, and the Wynantskill and Poesten Kill tumbled down from the hills behind town with water power to spare. That rare combination — ocean navigation, canal freight, and falling water in one place — turned Troy into one of the most productive industrial cities in nineteenth-century America.

It armed the Union. When the ironclad USS Monitor was rushed into being in the winter of 1861–62, its iron came largely from Troy: the Albany Iron Works rolled the hull plates and the neighboring Rensselaer Iron Works forged the rivets. Troy iron went to sea at Hampton Roads and helped change naval warfare in an afternoon. The city’s greatest ironmaster, though, made his name on something humbler and endless: horseshoes. Henry Burden, a Scottish-born engineer who came to Troy in the 1820s, built machines that spat out finished horseshoes by the millions, and powered his works on the Wynantskill with the Burden Water Wheel — a colossus 62 feet across and 22 feet wide, weighing some 250 tons and turning out roughly 500 horsepower. Built in 1851, it is remembered as one of the most powerful vertical water wheels ever built, and it turned, day and night, for nearly half a century before it was abandoned in the 1890s.

And it dressed the country. In 1827, by local tradition, a Troy housewife named Hannah Montague grew tired of laundering her husband’s whole shirt when only the collar was soiled, and simply cut the collar off to wash it separately. The detachable collar was born, and Troy became the “Collar City,” at its peak producing the overwhelming majority of the collars worn in America. The industry’s giant was Cluett, Peabody & Co., whose Arrow brand — sold behind the impossibly dapper illustrated “Arrow Collar Man” — made Troy shirts a national byword for style.

All of that industry needed engineers, and Troy built the school that made them. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was founded here on November 5, 1824 — the year before the Erie Canal opened — by patroon Stephen Van Rensselaer and the scientist Amos Eaton, “for the application of science to the common purposes of life.” It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world, and its graduates went on to build the bridges, railroads, and waterworks of a rising continent.

Troy’s most famous export, though, wears a top hat. By long tradition, the nation’s nickname was born here: Samuel Wilson, a Troy meatpacker who supplied the U.S. Army in the War of 1812, is said to have stamped his provision barrels “U.S.,” and soldiers joked the initials stood for “Uncle Sam.” Historians treat the barrel-stamp anecdote as folklore — the printed tale postdates the war, and “Uncle Sam” had appeared in print even before Wilson’s contract — but the affection was real enough that Congress formally recognized Troy’s Samuel Wilson as the namesake in 1961. Wilson lies today in the city’s Oakwood Cemetery, above the tidewater river that made Troy rich. Tie up at the downtown marina and it is all within a walk: the Collar City that clothed America, the ironworks that armored it, and the quiet grave of the man who gave it a name.