The Albany Pine Bush, referred to locally as the Pine Bush, is one of the largest inland pine barrens in the world. It is centrally located in New York's Capital District within Albany and Schenectady counties, between the cities of Albany and Schenectady. The Albany Pine Bush was formed thousands of years ago, following the drainage of Glacial Lake Albany.
The Albany Pine Bush is the sole remaining undeveloped portion of a pine barrens that once covered over , and is "one of the best and last remaining examples of an inland pine barrens ecosystem on Earth". By 2008 it included all parcels of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve (a state nature preserve spanning ), the properties that connect these protected parcels, and some of the surrounding areas that abut the preserve. The Woodlawn Preserve and surrounding areas in Schenectady County are the western sections of the Pine Bush, separated geographically by other properties from the Albany Pine Bush Preserve in Albany County.
Historically regarded by European settlers as desolate and dangerous to cross, the Pine Bush has come to be seen as a historical, cultural, and environmental asset to the Capital District and Hudson Valley regions of New York. It is home to the Karner blue butterfly, an endangered species first identified by author Vladimir Nabokov in 1944 using a type specimen from the Pine Bush. In 2014, Albany Pine Bush was designated as a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service.
History European colonization Around 10,000 years ago Native Americans moved into the Pine Bush area. When Europeans arrived in the early 17th century, two groups lived in the immediate area: the Mohawk nation of the Haudenosaunee to the west along the Mohawk River, and the Mohican to the east, along the Hudson River. The Dutch traded with both native groups from their outpost at Fort Orange (present-day Albany), which was established in 1624. For the natives the Pine Bush was an important source of firewood and animal pelts to trade with the Dutch. By 1640 the natives were having trouble finding enough animals in the Pine Bush to supply the growing European demand. The Mohawk referred to the settlement at Fort Orange as skahnéhtati, meaning "beyond the pine plains", referring to the large area of the Pine Bush between the Hudson and Mohawk rivers.
The Dutch granted a patent in 1661 under the name of Schenectady to a settlement on a bend in the Mohawk River to the west of the Pine Bush and about 20 miles from Fort Orange. To the settlers at Fort Orange, the settlement on the Mohawk River started by Arent van Curler was "beyond the pine plains", and therefore the name Schenectady (in various spellings) became associated with the village at that site. In 1664, the Dutch surrendered their entire colony of New Netherland, including Albany and Schenectady, to the English.
What became known as the King's Highway were a series of footpaths which the Mohawk had long used to get from west in the valley through the Pine Bush to trade with other tribes at the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. This area was later the site of the Dutch Fort Orange. After the founding of Schenectady, the name was used for what became a major route between the two settlements but, until the mid-18th century, it was not improved beyond a footpath. During the war from 1699 to 1707, Albany residents collected firewood from the Pine Bush for the large army that was camped at Fort Frederick.
In 1710, Germans immigrated from Palatine to the Albany area. To pay off the cost of their passage some were sent to work camps in the Pine Bush to harvest pines for pitch and rosin for the construction of English naval vessels. Some of these immigrants named the Helderberg Escarpment and settled Schoharie County. Others, largely from work camps in Dutchess County along the Hudson River, settled further west in the valley in 1723, past Little Falls on the Burnetsfield Patent.
During the French and Indian Wars, the British military improved the road significantly for use by its forces. After the war it was used by numerous settlers moving west into the Mohawk Valley. During the late-18th century, taverns and the occasional homesteader began to dot the Pine Bush along the King's Highway, while development began to encroach on the Pine Bush at the Albany and Schenectady edges as those settlements began to grow. The highway and the Pine Bush was a frontier wilderness and extremely dangerous even after the end of the war. Starting in 1765, militiamen took turns escorting travelers through the area to protect them from outlaws, bandits, smugglers, and other dangers. During the American Revolutionary War, the Bush was home to Loyalists of the British Crown. Among the taverns established in the 1760s catering to Pine Bush travelers was the Truax Tavern owned by Isaac Truax, a descendant of French Huguenots and a Tory sympathizer; he said that he was "not a Tory, but a man for the King". Rumors circulated of several murders/robberies being carried out at the tavern.
Travel became easier in 1793 following the revolution, when a stage coach began carrying passengers between the two cities and through the Pine Bush for three cents per mile.
19th century The 19th century saw great improvements in modes of transportation for traveling through the Pine Bush with better roads and soon thereafter railroads. Beginning in 1799 the Great Western Turnpike (today's US Route 20) and the Albany-Schenectady Turnpike (New York Route 5) were built through the Pine Bush. The Western Turnpike connected Albany west across the state to the American Midwest, while the Albany-Schenectady Turnpike replaced the King's Highway to Schenectady. The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was chartered in 1826 in order to reduce travel time between Schenectady and Albany via the Erie Canal; it was the first railroad in the state of New York, and the fourth in the United States. On July 2, 1830, the DeWitt Clinton pulled the first passenger train in the United States, traveling over the route through the heart of the Pine Bush.
Over time, the turnpikes and railroad opened up parts of the Pine Bush to settlement, farming, and land speculation. One of the earliest residents was Theophillus Roessle, who owned a large farm and manor in what is now the hamlet of Roessleville, just outside Albany in the town of Colonie. He claimed that the sandy soil of the Pine Bush was "the best land for fruits in the world". Further west, part of the Pine Bush was carved up in 1858 into 860 plots as part of what is now known as the "Great Land Swindle" and sold to buyers outside the region. When they came to inspect their land, they thought the barrens were useless for agriculture; they tried to recoup their money by selling the land to other unsuspecting outsiders.
As in the colonial period, the Pine Bush continued to be tapped for its natural resources, with water becoming a target for development. The Patroon Creek, roughly where three feeder streams joined in the heart of the Pine Bush along Albany's northern border, was dammed in 1850 to form Rensselaer Lake waterworks.
In 1871, the northwestern portion of Albany west of Magazine Street, consisting of mostly undeveloped Pine Bush, was annexed to the neighboring Town of Guilderland after the Town of Watervliet refused it.
Portions of this territory were ceded to Albany in 1910 established its current border. A telling perspective of how it was viewed at the time is contained in the enabling law (Chapter 375 of the Laws of New York, 1910), which described the Pine Bush as "being a territory lying to the west of the present boundary line of the city and which is in large part waste and unoccupied land, the ownership of which is uncertain". This law authorized Albany to lay out the newly annexed territory into lots and acquire land for a park system to connect the Rensselaer Lake waterworks property to the old city border.
20th century As part of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to industrial cities in the early 20th century, the Reverend Louis W. Parson and his wife migrated in 1927 from Mississippi to Albany, where he founded the First Church of God in Christ. In four trips to Mississippi, Parson encouraged friends and family to move to Albany and join the church, which many did during the 1930s and 1940s. The reverend felt that the mores of Albany's South End, where they originally settled, was not conducive to religious life. He started a community in the Pine Bush along Rapp Road, purchasing two undeveloped properties in 1930 and 1933. It is a rare example of a chain migration community surviving from the Great Migration. This narrow entity is today designated as the Rapp Road Community Historic District, listed on both the state and the National Register of Historic Places. Accompanying 18 photos, undated
In 1912, the city of Albany commissioned a study by notable architect Arnold W. Brunner and landscape architect Charles Downing Lay for beautification of the city; it was published as Studies for Albany. Brunner and Lay proposed using the Rensselaer Lake waterworks property as the core of a new natural park, preferably leaving much of the grounds in their natural state; "[i]n fact the less done to it the better". The city never acquired more land for a park here, and portions of the original waterworks property were sold off piecemeal and developed over the following century.
In the 1950s, the New York State Thruway (Interstate 90) was built through the Pine Bush, disrupting habitat and ecology. Further development took place in the 1950s and 60s with the construction of the W. Averell Harriman State Office Building Campus and the SUNY Albany uptown campus. In the 21st century, the remaining Pine Bush represents only about 10% of the undeveloped land that existed prior to 1950.
In the 1960s, longtime Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd pushed forward the Washington Avenue Extension, a four-lane divided highway extending Washington Avenue westward from Fuller Road through the Pine Bush to New Karner Road (NY Route 155). This opened the heart of the Pine Bush and the western section of the city to development and has been described as "a knife through the heart of the Pine Bush". Soon afterward, Neil Hellman, a race horse magnate and major developer in the city, proposed a huge "city within a city" on that would have apartments, stores, an office park, one or two schools, and fire and police stations. Mayor Corning estimated between 10,000 and 15,000 persons would live there. Environmentalists and neighborhood groups fought and ultimately defeated this proposal.
Mayor Corning gave archaeologist Don Rittner a $500 donation in 1972 to excavate the Truax Tavern along the King's Highway. Rittner disproved the prevailing historical beliefs concerning the sophistication and structure of the tavern. He discovered several skeletons under the tavern's floor, which may confirm rumors of murders having taken place at the tavern. As a result of this project, Rittner was appointed as Albany's first municipal archaeologist, possibly the first of such a position in the nation.
While Mayor Corning supported the largest purchases of Pine Bush land as a city preserve, he also approved placing the Albany landfill in the Pine Bush, the construction of the Washington Avenue Extension, and authorizing much of the development that occurred during his 42 years in office as mayor. These all had adverse environmental effects on the Bush. In 1967, a portion of Albany's waterworks/Pine Bush property in the town of Colonie along Central Avenue was sold to developers who built the Northway Mall. Two years later the city moved its dump to the Pine Bush. The Dunes, a single-family housing development in the middle of the Pine Bush off the Washington Avenue Extension, was built in the mid-1970s.