Schenectady, NY news and local guide

When Europeans arrived, the Mohawk Valley was the land of the Mohawk, one of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, who had lived in the region since at least 1100 AD. In the early 1600s they moved their villages closer to the river, and by 1629 they had taken land on the west bank of the Hudson from the Mahican. In the 1640s they had three main villages on the south side of the Mohawk River. After the Dutch built Fort Orange at Albany beginning in 1614, the Mohawk called that settlement skahnehtati, "beyond the pines," for the pine barrens between their villages and the Hudson, about 3,200 acres of which survive as the Albany Pine Bush. The Dutch adopted the word for the new village on the Mohawk flats, which became Schenectady.

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In 1661 Arendt van Curler, a Dutch immigrant, bought a large tract on the south side of the Mohawk, and other colonists received grants on the fertile bottomlands the Mohawk had farmed for maize for centuries. The Mohawk deed for Schenectady was signed in 1672, and in 1684 Governor Thomas Dongan granted letters patent to five more trustees. On February 8, 1690, during King William's War, French troops and their Native allies, mostly Ojibwe and Algonquin warriors, made a surprise attack on Schenectady. They killed 62 people, 11 of them enslaved Africans, and took 27 captive in what became known as the Schenectady massacre. Sources Wikipedia: Schenectady, New York