What is the Hudson River?

The Hudson River is a major river on the East Coast of the United States, flowing about 315 miles from the Adirondack Mountains of northeastern New York to New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, where it forms the western edge of Manhattan and the boundary between New York and New Jersey. The river rises at Henderson Lake in the Adirondack High Peaks region and flows south through Newcomb, then northwest to North Creek where the Boreas River joins, then south past Glens Falls. The river becomes navigable for commercial shipping below Troy, where the Federal Dam separates the upper river from the tidal estuary. From Troy south to New York Harbor, about 153 miles, the Hudson is technically a tidal estuary, with ocean tides reaching all the way to Albany and water salinity decreasing inland with the season. The Mohawk River, the Hudson's largest tributary, joins from the west just below Troy.

The Hudson flows south past Albany (the New York state capital), Hudson, Catskill, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Newburgh, West Point (home of the United States Military Academy founded March 16, 1802), Peekskill, Tarrytown, Yonkers, and finally between Manhattan and Hoboken/Jersey City to New York Harbor. The Hudson Valley between Albany and New York City is geologically a fjord, the only true fjord on the U.S. East Coast, carved by glaciers during the last ice age.

The river was central to American history. Henry Hudson sailed up the river in his ship Half Moon in September 1609 looking for the Northwest Passage, giving the river its English name. The Dutch established New Amsterdam at the mouth in 1624 and Fort Orange (now Albany) in 1624. The British took the colony in 1664 and renamed it New York.

During the Revolutionary War, the Hudson was strategically vital because British control would have split the colonies. The Hudson Highlands around West Point were heavily fortified, and George Washington stretched a great chain across the river at West Point to block British ships in 1778. Benedict Arnold's 1780 plot to surrender West Point to the British was a major attempted treason.

The Erie Canal completed October 26, 1825 connected the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, creating a water route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes that transformed New York City into the busiest port in North America and accelerated the development of the Old Northwest. The Hudson River School of landscape painting, including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church, made the river an icon of American Romantic art beginning in the 1830s.

The Hudson today supports commercial shipping, recreation, and a steadily restored ecosystem.