Rensselaer County /rɛnsəˈlɪər/ ren-sə-LEER is a county in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 161,130. Its county seat is Troy. The county is named in honor of the family of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, the original Dutch owner of the land in the area. The county is part of the Capital District region of the state.
Rensselaer County is part of the Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Troy is a city in and the county seat of Rensselaer County, New York, United States. It is located on the western edge of the county, on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just northeast of the capital city of Albany. At the 2020 census, the population of Troy was 51,401. Troy has close ties to Albany and nearby Schenectady, forming a region called the Capital District, which has a population of 1.24 million.
The area had long been occupied by the Mohican Indian tribe, but Dutch settlement began in the mid-17th century. The Dutch colony was conquered by the English in 1664, renamed Troy in 1789 and was incorporated as a town in 1791. Due to the confluence of major waterways and a geography that supported water power, the American Industrial Revolution took hold in this area, making Troy reputedly the fourth-wealthiest city in America around the turn of the 20th century. As a result, Troy is noted for its Victorian architecture. Troy is home to a number of institutions of higher learning, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hudson Valley Community College and Russell Sage College.
Rensselaerswyck was a Dutch colonial patroonship and later an English manor owned by the van Rensselaer family located in the present-day Capital District of New York in the United States.
The estate was originally deeded by the Dutch West India Company in 1630 to Kiliaen van Rensselaer, a Dutch merchant and one of the company's original directors. Rensselaerswyck extended for miles on each side of the Hudson River. It included most of the land that would later become the New York counties of Albany and Rensselaer, as well as parts of Columbia and Greene counties.