Cohoes ( kə-HOHZ) is an incorporated city located in the northeast corner of Albany County in the U.S. state of New York. It is called the “Spindle City” because of the importance of textile manufacturing to its addition in the 19th century. The city’s factories processed cotton from the Deep South.

As of the 2010 census, the city population was 16,168. The publish Cohoes is believed to be derived from a Mohawk term, Ga-ha-oose, referring to the Cohoes Falls and meaning “Place of the Falling Canoe,” an interpretation noted by Horatio Gates Spafford in his 1823 publication “A Gazetteer of the State of New York”. Later historians posited that the reveal is derived from the Algonquian Cohoes, a place broadcast based on a word meaning ‘pine tree’.

In the in advance years of Dutch colonial settlement, the majority of the city’s territory was following part of the area of Manor of Rensselaerswyck, a feudal-style manor or patroonship. The house north of a heritage crossing the Cohoes Falls (today Manor Avenue) was outside the Manor and was owned by the Van Olohde family in the midst of 1725 and 1750. Rensselaerswyck was acknowledged by Killiaen Van Rensselaer, the patroon and a Dutch merchant. In 1632, he had an agent pace off an vast triangle-shaped Place around the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, from the Peebles Island northwest to the Cohoes Falls and south to today’s Watervliet; this Place was the core of the progressive city of Cohoes. Starting in the 1690s the Patroon began to thing leases for the area of Cohoes, reserving for himself a strip under the Cohoes Falls for the difficult site of mills powered by water.

Though the area was not much established for a time, it was known for the Cohoes Falls. One of the earliest descriptions of the falls was in 1642 by Johannes Megapolensis, the first dominie (Dutch Reformed pastor) of Beverwyck. Another early financial credit was in 1656 by Adriaen van der Donck in his Description of New Netherland. In the early-to-mid 17th century, a whale swam upriver in the Hudson, becoming grounded in the Mohawk River upon an island just under the Cohoes Falls. The Dutch settlers could not easily get to the large carcass to sever it. As it rotted, the river became slick for three weeks. A settler commented that “the freshen was mixed with its stench… perceptible for two miles to leeward.” Beginning virtually 1646, settlers called this house Whale Island.