Troy is a city in the United States state of New York and is the county seat of Rensselaer County, New York. It's famous for being the home of Uncle Sam, known as the person who supplied beef for the United States Army during the War of 1812. It's also known for the home of Garnet Douglass Baltimore, who is known as the first African-American to become an engineer and graduated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1881. It is located on the western edge of that county on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just northeast of the capital city of Albany. Troy has close ties to Albany, New York and nearby Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital District. The city is one of the three major centers for the Albany metropolitan statistical area, which has a population of 1,170,483. At the 2020 census, the population of Troy was 51,401. However, there are several smaller cities close to it, such as Cohoes, Saratoga Springs, and Hudson. Troy is home to a number of institutions of higher learning: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the oldest private engineering and technical university in the US, founded in 1824; Hudson Valley Community College, part of the sprawling University of the State of New York system that offers both two-year and four-year degrees; the Sage Colleges, which consists of the Russell Sage College headquarters in downtown Troy, an Albany campus, and a graduate-level division, and the Emma Willard School, an all-girls residential high school started by Emma Willard, a women's education activist who sought to create a school for girls equal to that available to their male counterparts. The Emma Willard School was the setting for scenes from the Al Pacino motion picture Scent of a Woman (1992) and the Kevin Kline film The Emperor's Club (2002). In addition, the city's abundance of preserved Victorian architecture has made it a desired place for filming of such productions as the HBO series “The Gilded Age” and such motion pictures as "Ironweed" (1987), "The Age of Innocence" (1993), "The Time Machine" (2002), and "Motherless Brooklyn" (2019), among numerous others. 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. Troy, originally known as Ashley's Ferry, is noted for a wealth of Victorian architecture downtown and elaborate private homes in various neighborhoods clustered along the river and on an undulating series of hills. Several churches have a concentrated collection of stained-glass windows by the iconic glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Troy also is home to the musically world-renowned Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, which dates from the 1870s and is regarded as having superb acoustics in a combination of restored and well-preserved performance spaces that regularly are used for recording musical performances. The area long had been occupied by the Mahican Indian tribe, but Dutch settlement began in the mid-17th Century. The patroon, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, who in the Dutch ascendancy ruled the region, called the region "Pafraets Dael" after his mother. The Dutch colony was conquered by the English in 1664. In 1707, Derick van der Heyden purchased a farm near today's downtown area. In 1771, Abraham J. Lansing had his farm in today's Lansingburgh neighborhood of the city laid out into lots. Sixteen years later, Van der Heyden's grandson Jacob had his extensive holdings surveyed and laid out into lots. He named the new village Vanderheyden or Vanderheyden Farms. In 1789, Troy adopted its present name following a vote of the people. Troy was incorporated as a town two years later, and extended east across the county to the Vermont state line. In 1796, Troy became a village and in 1816, it became a city. Lansingburgh, to the north, was voluntarily annexed to become part of Troy in 1900.