Day’s Timber Harvesting

About forestry service, 12009, Altamont, NY, US, New York

Averill Park is a census-designated place within the town of Sand Lake in Rensselaer County, New York, United States. The population was 2,098 at the 2020 census. The community is named after the local Averill family. It is located on Route 43, south of Crystal Lake and east of West Sand Lake. The Sand Lake Baptist Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. == Demographics == == History == Originally known only as part of greater Sand Lake, the community along with neighboring towns grew with the nineteenth-century development of wool and cotton textile manufacturing by local watermills and knitting factories along the Wynants Kill tributary of the Hudson River. By the 1880s, several independent local mills produced hosiery, undergarments, and knit shirts. The hamlet was named Averill in 1880 after a local leading family, then in 1882 renamed Averill Park in promotion of local summer-resort development and of the Troy & New England Railway, a never-completed trolley and freight line intended to connect the city of Troy, New York with the mills and summer resorts of Averill Park and its “upstate Coney Island” recreational Crystal Lake Beach, and with the mills of the neighboring town of West Sand Lake. The local mills declined after the increasing efficiency of steam and electrical power improved competition from regional factories, and were then destroyed by a 1891 river flood. The Faith Knitting Company (later Faith Mills), founded in 1897, restored local industry by buying and re-equipping the old mills and rehiring local labor.