Historian

Frances Dumas - 315-536-5147

417 Liberty St., Penn Yan, NY 14527

Milo was organized in 1818 from part of the town of Benton in Ontario County, and then still included part of the modern town of Torrey. Its original boundaries included the part of the seventh township in the first range that was not part of Jerusalem, and the land east of that to Seneca Lake. It was proposed to name it Milan after the city in northern Italy, but since another town in Dutchess County had a 10-day priority to use of the name, it was changed to Milo, the provenance of which is unclear. It was one of Yates County's five original towns.

Milo contains some excellent farmland, and is the only town to have frontage on two of the beautiful Finger Lakes. The hamlet of Milo Center was founded in 1789 by several families who came to this part of New York with the Universal Friend, thus making it the state's oldest continuously inhabited settlement west of Seneca Lake. Other hamlets persist at Himrod and Second Milo. The Outlet of Keuka Lake flows through the northern part of the town east of Penn Yan, and since it is one of the area's few reliable perennial streams it was once the focus of a thriving water-powered milling industry. The first mill in western New York was built by the Univeral Friends in 1790, and the same site was still generating electricity in 1958.

Milo contains much of the village of Penn Yan, everything south of North Avenue and east of a line that passes just west of Lakeview Cemetery. The town hall is in the village of Penn Yan, at 137 Main Street.

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