One more glance at your early history. Three years after the landing of
the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Fort Orange was erected, in the center of what
is now the business part of the city of Albany; and, a few years later,
the little hamlet of Beverswyck began to nestle under its walls. Two
centuries ago, my Albanian friends, this very year, and I believe this
very month of August, your forefathers assembled, not to inaugurate an
observatory, but to lay the foundations of a new church, in the place of
the rude cabin which had hitherto served them in that capacity. It was
built at the intersection of Yonker's and Handelaar's, better known
to you as State and Market streets. Public and private liberality
coöperated in the important work. The authorities at the Fort gave
fifteen hundred guilders; the patroon of that early day, with the
liberality coëval with the name and the race, contributed a thousand;
while the inhabitants, for whose benefit it was erected, whose numbers
were small and their resources smaller, contributed twenty beavers "for
the purchase of an oaken pulpit in Holland." Whether the largest part of
this subscription was bestowed by some liberal benefactress, tradition
has not informed us.


NEW AMSTERDAM

Nor is the year 1656 memorable in the annals of Albany alone. In
that same year your imperial metropolis, then numbering about three
hundred inhabitants, was first laid out as a city, by the name of New
Amsterdam.[A] In eight years more, New Netherland becomes New York; Fort
Orange and its dependent hamlet assumes the name of Albany. A century
of various fortune succeeds; the scourge of French and Indian war is
rarely absent from the land; every shock of European policy vibrates
with electric rapidity across the Atlantic; but the year 1756 finds