Castleton, four miles, and the Overslaugh, three miles from Albany, mark a number of
bars or flats which have. much impeded the navigation. The attention of the general
government has recently been directed to their removal.
Benson Lossing describes the village in 1866: "The first village below Albany is pretty one of Castleton, on the Hudson River Railway, about eight miles below Greenbush. Around it is a pleasant agricultural country, and between it and Albany, on the western shore, flows in the romantic Norman's Kill ( the Indian Tawasentha, or Place of many Dead), that comes down from the region of the lofty Helderbergs."
Arthur Adams in the Hudson River Guidebook says that between 1860 and 1923 Castleton had 13 ice houses supplying New York City with its ice.