New Museum Exhibit Details City’s 400-Year-Old Dutch Roots

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The New York State Museum has set an early May opening date for its new exhibit highlighting artifacts from Albany's nearly four-century-old Dutch roots.

The exhibit will open May 5 at the downtown Albany museum. It's title — "a small fort, which our people call Fort Orange" — is taken from an account a Dutch West India Company official wrote in 1625 describing the 1-year-old settlement at what is now known as Albany.

The exhibit will feature never-before-displayed artifacts that were discovered by state archaeologists along the Hudson River's west bank ahead of the construction of Interstate 787 in the early 1970s. The artifacts were found on the site of Fort Orange, established in 1624 as the first permanent Dutch settlement in New Netherland.

The State Museum has 36,000 objects in its Fort Orange archaeology collection.