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is a city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 5,019 at the 2000 census. The name is derived from the occupations of early residents.
The city is located on the eastern border of Saratoga County and is north of Albany, the state capital. Mechanicville borders the towns of Halfmoon (of which it was once a part) and Stillwater in the county, and the town of Schaghticoke, in Rensselaer County.
The first European settlers on the Tenendeho Creek in the area of today's Mechanicville arrived in 1764. Actually, the first listing for a settlement on Thenendehowa Creek is in 1721. At that time, Cornelius Van Buren had a sawmill at the mouth of the creek where it emptied into the Hudson. The first documented occurrence of the name "Mechanicville" dates back to 1829. The name comes from the early settlers, who were independent mastercraftsmen such as millers, carpenters, or butchers, whose professions were commonly known as the "mechanical arts" at the time.
About 35 years later, small flour mills were already established. When the Champlain Canal reached the settlement in 1823, and especially when the Saratoga and Renselaer Railway laid a track through the area in 1835, Mechanicville became an important commerce interchange.
The community became an incorporated village in 1859, when it had about 1000 inhabitants. It grew rapidly as textile mills, factories and a linen thread company came to Mechanicville. The first conspicuous casualty of the American Civil War, Elmer E. Ellsworth, was buried in Mechanicville in 1861. In 1878, additional railways came to the village, and it became an important center of papermaking. In 1898, a hydroelectric power plant was built on the Hudson River by Robert Newton King, and is now the oldest continusously-operating hydroelectric plant in the United States. By 1900, it was a major transfer yard and car repair center for the railways. In the 1920s, Mechanicville had a population of nearly 10000.
Mechanicville became a city in 1915. By 1932, it became the terminal of the first experimental High Volume Direct Current (HVDC) scheme in the U.S.: the HVDC Mechanicville-Schenectady.
With the decline of the railroads, Mechanicville suffered. The largest paper mill in the world which Mechanicville had once hosted (in 1904), ceased operations in 1971. The once thriving industry city is today a quiet residential city, with most inhabitants working in Albany, Schenectady, and other nearby communities.
On November 1st, 2001, Mechanicville was featured on the Daily Show with then-rising comedian Steve Carell.