the family's farms was called Grand Division Street, later shortened to Grand Street. They based its grid-like street plan on Philadelphia's, with numbered north-south streets running inland from the river after River Street, the city's first commercial center. Lots there, at the time, ran all the way to the river's waterline, giving their owners the unusual advantage of river and street frontage. The sloping bluff also allowed them to build multi-story warehouses and granaries closer to the unloading points along the river. In 1793, the new settlement was designated the Rensselaer County seat. Two years later, the visiting Duke de la Rochefoucauld noted the "neat and numerous houses" and active businesses engaged in river-based trade. "The sight of this activity is truly charming", he said, in one of the earliest published descriptions of the city. In 1798 Troy incorporated as a village. The village's population more than tripled in the first 15 years of the new century, leading it to reincorporate as a city in 1816. With River Street getting built out, banks began taking advantage of the street plan and locating on First Street, previously a residential area. By 1807, another visitor from abroad, British painter John Lambert, described a town that had already grown considerably from what de la Rochefoucauld saw a dozen years earlier: Little of that Troy remains due to an 1820 fire which started in a First Street stable and eventually consumed much of the extant village. A column at 225 River Street bears a stone indicating that this was where the fire was stopped after it had gone on for weeks. Unlike its classical namesake, Troy rebuilt quickly, with newer brick homes and commercial buildings, built to stricter standards, replacing the old ones and expanding again. The Hart-Cluett Mansion, an 1827 Federal style house on Second Street, is one of the best surviving buildings from this era. Although it was previously attributed to Philip Hooker, new research has determined that the house's architect was Martin Euclid Thompson and the builder was John Bard Colegrove. Industrialization and growth In 1824, a gazetteer of the state echoed earlier accounts in calling River Street "the mart of business". The same year, RPI was founded on the hill to the east of downtown, to train engineers for the city's burgeoning industrial sector. The relationship between the city and university would later become significant in preserving the historic district.