The Dukes of Rensselaer

I grew up in Center Brunswick. The desolate wastelands, the blasted heaths of Center Brunswick.

Center Brunswick is a village, a hamlet, a neighborhood, in a larger township. A few houses, a gas station, a few old barns. The cows are gone and lamented. The township is Brunswick;—the Town of Brunswick. One of fourteen townships in Rensselaer County.

The odd thing is, no one has any idea where the town name came from. As a young historian growing up in Center Brunswick, this question was always irritating to me.

The best answer to the the question was an old history, by a Saratoga Springs lawyer and historian, N. B. Sylvester, published at the turn of the last century, (and therefore nearly a century after the fact), that possibly the name came from the fact that Germans settled the area. A brilliant solution to the problem, except, if you give it a moment's thought, makes no sense at all. First of all, there are not a lot of Germans that settled in the area; or if they did, they snuck away quietly when no one was looking, because there are no more German last names in the records of the town than there are in any other town. But more than that, in Germany, there is no Brunswick, there is a Braunschweig. If German settlers were going to name a town Braunschweig, they would have called it Braunschweig.

This explanation never sounded like anything more than someone just making things up.

(No offense to the dear and deceased Mr. Sylvester, by the way, who only passed it on as speculation.)

On the other hand, I have long suspected that the name of the Town of Brunswick is actually associated with one or more Dukes of Brunswick. The Hannoverian Kings of Britain were all Dukes of Brunswick, (Georges I, II, III, & IV), and more than one Duke of Brunswick cut a dashing figure on the battlefield.

Tonight though, while poking around and revisiting the issue, I found that the neighboring township to the east, Grafton, was created in 1807, the same time as Brunswick. They were both the rural hinterland above Troy, and when Troy was incorporated as a city, Brunswick and Grafton were created out of the remainder of the old Troy limits.

Neither of these towns were called by these names prior to 1807, Brunswick was Elizabethtown, and Grafton was Roxborough.

So, what do Brunswick and Grafton, as words, have to do with each other? —Grafton is also a British ducal title. Brunswick has to be after the Duke of Brunswick because the town's twin, Grafton, is named after the Duke of Grafton. (And for that matter, vice versa).

Not convinced? It turns out, that in 1806, the year before, the county created the Town of Philipstown in the south of the county. In 1808, Philipstown's name was changed. To Nassau. Another British ducal title. (By a stretch, anyway. British King William of lasting memory as William and Mary, was, before his acension to the throne, William, Duke of Orange-Nassau.)

So. Three town names in two years, and the only thing they share in common is they are all ducal titles in Britain.

The question, then, is answered.

The interesting thing is that, back then, somewhere, close to some position of authority, there was someone who clearly did this as a plan; someone who intended matching town names. The Three Dukes of Rensselaer. Can't say as yet that I know who this was.

And then, the other delightful and yet baffling aspect of this, is that on August 10, 2009, I managed to figure this out, and that no one else in Rensselaer County has pieced this together in 202 years.