Sand Lake Township lies just south of Troy and east of Albany. This community was a center of water-powered industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Dams on Crystal, Glass, and Burden Lakes provided waterpower for mills along the Wynantskill and finally for the largest waterwheel in North America at Burden Iron Works in Troy. When the railway arrived, the township with its seven lakes and numerous hotels blossomed into a tourist destination. In Sand Lake you will find Dr. Smith Boughton as "Big Thunder" in the Anti-Rent Wars of the mid-1800s, coded messages issued from church pulpits for transporting slaves via the Underground Railroad, Uline's Infallible Remedy cure-all, the Park Pharmacy soda fountain manned by teenager (later comedian) Jerry Lewis, and Gov. Theodore
Roosevelt at Brown's Crooked Lake House.