Oct. 11--MALTA -- Gov. DeWitt Clinton was considered nutty for proposing to spend $7 million in 1817 to build a 363-mile canal from Albany to Buffalo, a public works project mocked as "Clinton's folly."

Thomas Edison's decision to relocate from New Jersey and establish the General Electric Co. in godforsaken Schenectady in 1886 raised eyebrows.

Derided by naysayers and considered ill-advised initially, the Erie Canal and GE proved to be two of the greatest transformative developments in the Capital Region's economic history, solid anchors of the local economy for generations.

History will be the judge whether AMD's plan to build a $4.6 billion chip fab plant in Saratoga County will live up to the hyperbole of boosters who tout it as "an Erie Canal for the 21st century."

Historians and academics are unwilling to declare AMD an epic addition at this point. They seem dubious about declaring it a rising tide that will life the fortunes of all Capital Region residents. There is consensus that it's a major investment, but not a Top 5 transformational project. Yet.

"At this point, nobody can say for sure whether AMD really will be the next big thing, although it will create follow-on businesses and it helps legitimize this area as a high-tech center," said P. Thomas Carroll, executive director of the Hudson Mohawk Industrial Gateway in Troy and an authority on America's 19th-century industrial history.

To add some perspective, the Burden Iron Works in Troy sold out about $1 million worth of horseshoes annually for four decades starting in the mid-1800s, or about $500 million in today's dollars.

Iron manufacturing was a durable local economic engine for more than two generations, while Carroll is not convinced that the here today, gone tomorrow mentality of Silicon Valley will allow AMD to make a lasting mark.

"My concern is that tech boom cities can die out quickly. I think we need to be wary that we're not getting into a Gold Rush mentality where you end up with a ghost town in 10 years," Carroll said.

Iron and railroads and the brawn of the Industrial Revolution muscled their way to the top of the heap in the local economy, but W. Douglas McCombs, curator of history at the Albany Institute of History and Art, finds that subtler, more diffuse developments can be equally transformative.

McCombs pointed to thousands of women employed in the textile industry in the late 19th- and early 20th-century in Troy shirt-collar factories and Cohoes woolen mills.