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() is a city located at the northeast corner of Albany County New York, USA. It is called the "Spindle City" because of the importance of textile production to its growth. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 15,521. The name is believed to arise from a Mohawk expression, Ga-ha-oose, which refers to the Cohoes Falls and means "Place of the Falling Canoe."
The city is on land purchased from the local natives in 1630. The land was once part of the Rensselaerwyck manor.
In 1831, a dam was constructed on the Mohawk River above the city's waterfall. This provided power to make the community a leading textile center with the establishment in 1836 of the Harmony Manufacturing Company, later famous as Harmony Mills. Cohoes became a mill town and to an extent a company town. During the 1870s the mills were enormously profitable because of the Erie Canal, which flowed past them at that time. Mill #3, at over long, has been considered the longest continuous textile mill in the country at the time. In 1848, Cohoes was incorporated as a village, and in 1869 chartered as a city.
In 1866, during excavation work for construction of Mill #3 of the Harmony Mills, the bones of a mastodon were unearthed over a period of several weeks. The Cohoes Mastodon skeleton was on display in the lobby of the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, but has recently been moved to a new location away from the windows of the lobby, where temperature and humidity fluxuations risked damaging the skeleton, to a new display near the rear of the museum. A furry replica can be seen at the Cohoes Public Library.
The 19th century saw an influx of immigrants to Cohoes to work in the mills, particularly French Canadians from Quebec, and Irish.
Around the turn of the century, daredevil Bobby Leach practiced going over the Cohoes Falls in a barrel before he performed the same stunt at Niagara. Cohoes residents watched this feat from the lawn or the porch of The Cataract House, the Victorian hotel at the corner of North Mohawk and School Streets, site of the present School Street Power Station.