Although substantial new immigration from the Netherlands ceased after 1664, many newcomers came to the city over the next 150 years. Mostly they arrived individually, settling in or moving on depending on opportunity and compatibility. Often, they caught on by marrying a daughter of New Netherland. Scottish-born and Dutch-speaking Robert Livingston was early Albany's most important newcomer. At the same time, many of the earliest settlers left the city establishing new communities in a ring around Albany at Schenectady, Catskill, Kinderhook, and old Saratoga, taking up farming in surrounding Rensselaerswyck and in the greater countryside, or leaving the region entirely.

Of the newcomers who came to Albany after 1664, the most distinguishable group was those of African ancestry, almost all of who were brought in as slaves. Like the Europeans, they raised families, accounting for at least one-tenth of the 16,000 people who lived in the city of Albany before the Industrial Revolution.

The next largest newcomer group included the several hundred soldiers and officials who came to Albany between 1676 and 1763 to serve at the fort and as agents of the British colonial empire. These young men mostly were recruited in Europe, chiefly in England and Ireland. Others were drawn from the other American colonies. Some of them found a niche in Albany providing transportation, hospitality, or supply services. A few were able to contribute a more rare skill or ability. They became attorneys, doctors, teachers, and businessmen. With connections to the British world, they were welcomed into traditional Albany households as husbands. One of these prized newcomers was Samuel Stringer.

Samuel Stringer was Albany's first professional physician. Born in Maryland in 1734 the son of an Annapolis physician, he was trained in Philadelphia where he came in contact with the leading medical practitioners of his day. Coming to Albany as a surgeon with the British army during the Seven Years War, in 1758, he married Rachel Vanderheyden, the daughter of an Albany merchant.

The first outsider to open a medical practice in Albany, Stringer's education and skill attracted many patients and he was widely known as an innovator who dared to inoculate for smallpox. During the 1760s and 70s, he broadened his economic base by investing in city and frontier land, trading in export commodities, and selling medical supplies. Pillar of St. Peter's Anglican Church, the Albany Masonic lodge, and the agent of Sir William Johnson, on the eve of the American Revolution forty-year-old Samuel Stringer had become one of leading members of the Albany community.

At the outbreak of the War for Independence, Samuel Stringer joined the revolutionary movement. In 1775, the Continental Congress appointed him chief physician and director of hospitals in the North. The Albany hospital located near the old fort became a center of medical learning where a generation of American physicians trained or learned new ways to treat the sick and wounded. Stringer held the directorship until 1777 when he left the army and fought for American liberties on the home front.

For a time he was chairman of the Albany Committee of Safety, was elected a city alderman, and then served as one of the Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies, a political body charged with suppressing anti-revolutionary activities during the latter stages of the war.

With the coming of peace, Dr. Stringer built a grand home on Market Street where he served an extensive practice, assembled a notable medical library, and imported the finest medical products which he retailed to a growing number of medical practitioners serving the booming upstate area. By then, he was one of a number of learned medical men who had made Albany their base of operations and who founded the New York State Medical Society in 1806. Enlightened physician, revolutionary leader, and leading citizen of Albany, this one-time newcomer died at his home on July 11, 1817.

Stringer was only one of a large number of newcomers who brought Albany into the modern American mainstream. Elkanah Watson;