North Country (New York) in the context of "Capital District, New York"

Upstate New York is a geographic region of New York State that lies north and northwest of the New York City metropolitan area of downstate New York. Upstate includes the middle and upper Hudson Valley, the Capital District, the Mohawk Valley region, Central New York, the Southern Tier, the Finger Lakes region, Western New York, and the North Country. Major cities across upstate New York from east to west include the state capital of Albany, Utica, Binghamton, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.

Before the European colonization of the Americas, the region of upstate New York was populated by several Native American tribes. It was home to the Iroquois Confederacy, an indigenous confederation of six tribes, known as the Six Nations. Henry Hudson made the first recorded European exploration of the region in 1609, and the Dutch erected Fort Orange (present-day Albany) in 1624, which was the first permanent European settlement in New York. The region saw many battles during the American Revolutionary War, with the Iroquois split between supporters of the loyalists and supporters of the revolutionaries. After the war ended, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix kicked off a series of treaties and purchases that saw the Iroquois cede the vast majority of their land in upstate New York to the newly formed United States.

Plattsburgh is a city in and the county seat of Clinton County, New York, United States, situated on the north-western shore of Lake Champlain. The population was 19,841 at the 2020 census. The population of the surrounding (and separately incorporated) Town of Plattsburgh was 11,886 as of the 2020 census, making the combined population of Plattsburgh to be 31,727. Plattsburgh lies just to the northeast of Adirondack Park, immediately outside of the park boundaries. It is the second largest community in the North Country region (after Watertown), and serves as the main commercial hub for the sparsely populated northern Adirondack Mountains. The land around Plattsburgh was previously inhabited by the Iroquois, Western Abenaki, Mohican, and Mohawk people. Samuel de Champlain was the first ever recorded European that sailed into Champlain Valley and later claimed the region as a part of New France in 1609.

Plattsburgh was the site of the amphibious Battle of Plattsburgh in the War of 1812, a key American victory that marked the end of hostilities in the Northern United States. It has been an important military outpost for much of its history, from hosting one of the largest Citizens' Military Training Camps prior to World War I, and Plattsburgh Air Force Base, the east coast center of operations for the Strategic Air Command during much of the Cold War period. The conversion of the base to a civilian airport in the 1990s resulted from the Base Realignment and Closure process during the wind down of the Cold War, and today it serves as a hub for economic development for the region. The city was named one of the Financial Times Top 10 Micro Cities of the Future several times.

Essex County is a county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 37,381. Its county seat is the hamlet of Elizabethtown. Its name is from the English county of Essex. Essex is one of two counties that are entirely within the Adirondack Park, the other being Hamilton County. The county is part of the North Country region of the state.

Interstate 87 (I-87) is a 333.49-mile-long (536.70 km) north–south Interstate Highway located entirely within the US state of New York. I-87 is the main highway that connects New York City and Montreal. The highway begins at exit 47 off I-278 in the New York City borough of the Bronx, just north of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. From there, the route runs northward through the Hudson Valley, the Capital District, and the easternmost part of the North Country to the Canada–United States border in the town of Champlain. At its north end, I-87 continues into Quebec as Autoroute 15 (A-15). I-87 connects with several regionally important roads: I-95 in New York City, New York State Route 17 (NY 17; future I-86) near Harriman, I-84 near Newburgh, and I-90 in Albany. The highway is not contiguous with I-87 in North Carolina.

I-87 was assigned in 1957 as part of the establishment of the Interstate Highway System. The portion of I-87 south of Albany follows two controlled-access highways that predate the Interstate Highway designation, the Major Deegan Expressway (locally known as "the Deegan") in New York City and the tolled New York State Thruway from the New York City line to Albany. North of Albany, I-87 follows the Adirondack Northway, a highway built in stages between 1957 and 1967 (finished just in time to bring Americans to the World Exhibition held in Montreal that year). Early proposals for I-87 called for the route to take a more easterly course through the Hudson Valley and extreme southwestern Connecticut between New York City and Newburgh. These plans were scrapped in 1970 when I-87 was realigned onto the Thruway between Westchester County and Newburgh.