What’s In A Name: Lackawanna and

Lackawanna and Mechanicville, N.Y.

By RAY BALOGH | The Municipal

One constant in American history has been the unflinching spirit of industriousness of its people. The courage and sacrifices of its earliest intrepid trailblazers carved the way for the pioneers who established communities through back-breaking toil while contending with the dangers posed by enemies and elements.

As the population grew and technology advanced, laborers took on the challenges of grueling, filthy work in factories and mills. Others performed the task of building essential infrastructure in the form of roads, canals and bridges.

That tireless work ethic was so endemic to America’s early settlements that some towns were named after businesses and industries, such as Lackawanna and Mechanicville, N.Y.

one-fifth of its population and has declined every decade until the 2010s, when it experienced a significant resurgence.

Recent efforts have been made to develop the resultant brownfields, and wind turbines were installed on the property in 2007. The city’s economy is now service-based.

Once a community bristling with places of worship, Mechanicville has only two remaining churches, one Catholic and one United Methodist.

(Photo by Carol Ann Mossa/Shutterstock)

Lackawanna is named for the steel company that occupied the city’s entire Lake Erie frontage. At its zenith, the municipality’s steel industry employed 20,000 people, more than Lackawanna’s current total population. (Photo by Pjard/Shutterstock)

Lackawanna

Lackawanna, a municipality of 19,949 on the Lake Erie shore in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area, was named for the Lackawanna Steel Company, the world’s largest steel plant during the early 20th century.

The area, originally part of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, was opened to settlement when the Seneca Indians sold it in 1842. Lackawanna’s nominal precursor, Seneca, was founded as a town in 1851 and changed its name to West Seneca the following year.

The Lackawanna Steel Company, originally based in Scranton, Pa., purchased West Seneca’s entire shoreline in 1899, began construction of its new plant in 1900, relocated to the area in 1902 and began operations in 1903.

In 1909 some of the area’s residents voted to split from West Seneca and formed a new city, which they dubbed Lackawanna.

Bethlehem Steel bought the company in 1922, and the city’s population and institutions blossomed. At its peak, the steel plant employed 20,000 people, many of them immigrants from a variety of nations. The town doubled in population, from 14,549 to its peak of 29,564, during the first half of the 20th century.

Industry restructuring and excessive town assessments caused Bethlehem’s business to decline. It drastically reduced operations in 1977 and closed its doors in 1983. During that decade, Lackawanna lost more than

Mechanicville

Mechanicville, the smallest city by area in New York, has a current population of 4,923. It is located on the Hudson River 20 miles north of Albany and midway between the restfully named towns of Stillwater and Halfmoon.

The city’s name derives from the occupations of its early residents when “mechanic” embraced a far broader definition than it does today.

“Mechanics” in the early settler days referred to independent master craftsmen in the artes mechaniae, or mechanical arts, from millers to carpenters to butchers and many professions in between. Such occupations were contrasted in medieval times to the so-called liberal arts worthy of free men, which included mathematicians, musicians, astronomers, orators, educators and the like.

Though the mechanical arts were deemed to be vulgar and servile, the more accurate—and euphemistic—terms include “useful arts” and “applied arts.”

The first documented settlement in the Mechanicville area was in 1721, when Cornelius Van Buren constructed a sawmill at the mouth of Thenendehowa Creek, where it emptied into the Hudson River.

The first printed reference to the name Mechanicville dates to 1829. Over the next several decades, flour mills were put into operation, and when the Champlain Canal and Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad reached the settlement, Mechanicville acquired prominence as an important commerce interchange.

The community, then with 1,000 residents, was incorporated as a village in 1859 and grew rapidly with the establishment of textile and paper mills, factories, brick makers, sash and blind manufacturers, the American Linen Thread Company and one of the country’s first manufacturers of friction matches.

Robert Newton King built a hydroelectric power plant on the Hudson River in 1898. That plant is now the oldest continuously operating hydroelectric plant in the United States.

Mechanicville became a city in 1915 and grew steadily until the decline of the railroads. Now a quiet residential city, it serves as a bedroom community for employees in Albany, Schenectady and other nearby municipalities.