Lansingburgh has a long and interesting history – in fact, if you told its founding fathers that the little village that became the city of Troy would rise to be one of the great powers of the industrial age, they may have doubted your sanity. Today we mostly only think of it in relation to its immediate neighbor to the south, but in fact it was long a vibrant community in its own right. And within that community, as in most of our communities, the lives and contributions of African-Americans have frequently been hidden, lost to time. And for such a tiny place, the Lansingburgh Historical Society is doing a tremendous job of highlighting some of those lives, with a set of biographies of African-American residents of Lansingburgh in history. Go there now and learn about the “Colored Temperance Convention,” the Gunn family members who modeled for Norman Rockwell, and the first African-American to serve on a Rensselaer County jury.
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