The towns and cities of New York's Capital District were created by the U.S. state of New York as municipalities in order to give residents more direct say over local government. The Capital District is an 11 county area, which consists of the counties of Albany, Schenectady, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schoharie, Warren, Washington, Columbia, Montgomery, Fulton, and Greene. New York experimented with different types of municipalities before settling upon the current format of towns and cities occupying all the land in a county. Districts were created for Albany and Tryon counties in 1772; all were transformed into towns (or divided into multiple towns) in 1788 when all of the state of New York was divided into towns. Two years before that, in 1786, all of what Washington County encompassed at t