Voorheesville, New York is located 10 miles south-west of the ciy of Albany in Albany County at 42.60° North, 73.90° West.
Voorheesville was originally settled in 1864 at the junction of the Albany & Susquehanna and the New York & Buffalo railroads. Alonzo Voorhees, an attorney for one of the railroads, built a house near the junction, and moved his practice there from Albany. Because of easy access to the railroads, a town quickly sprung up at the junction, and was called Farlin. In 1899, when the village was incorporated into Albany County, the name was changed to Voorheesville.
The original train station was set on the northwest corner of the junction, with platforms on both sets of rails to provide easy transfer. After Amtrak diverted it's passenger service to Rensselaer, on the east bank of the Hudson River, the station house was abandoned, and was eventually demolished. However, great amounts of freight continues to roll through the junction, and a larger freight rail yard was build to the east, in the neighboring village of Bethlehem.
Voorheesville sits at the foot of the Helderbergs, a small extension of the Catskill mountain range. Helderberg means "Clear Mountains" in Dutch, and got its name because the hillsides can be clearly seen from the Hudson River. In the late 19th Century, Voorheesville had a mild tourism industry, as people from Albany would come to the hills to get away from urban life.
Today, Voorheesville is a solidly a suburb of Albany, with many subdivisions appearing in the last twenty years. It now has a population of about five thousand.
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