Every town has founders. Millerton's were a handful of farmers and merchants in the Town of North East who understood, in 1851, that the railroad coming up the Harlem Valley was going to change everything — and decided to be ready for it.

The Names in the Records

The 1882 county history records that the meeting at which the village was named was held in 1851 at the house of Walter Wakeman. Wakeman was a farmer who, according to research reported by The Millerton News, had come to North East around 1810, worked for the Winchell family, and married Almira Winchell. He died in 1868 and is buried in Irondale Cemetery, just outside the village he helped christen.

Village accounts of that founding era also name Alexander Trowbridge, Alexander Holley and members of the Winchell family among the men who planned for the village's growth. The records back up their commitment: in 1852, one year after the tracks arrived, Alexander Trowbridge, Alexander Holley and James M. Winchell built the Millerton Hotel, the new settlement's first major establishment. Merchant E. W. Simmons kept what was probably the first store, in the village's first building, raised in 1851.

When the village incorporated on June 30, 1875, a new generation of names took office — Nathan C. Beach, Orrin Wakeman, Hilem B. Eggleston, Ward B. Grey, John M. Benedict, William E. Penney — many of them merchants whose businesses lined the young Main Street.

The Seven Founders: A Family Account

No official roster of founders survives from 1851, and different accounts emphasize different names. One family tradition, shared with AnyoneNews by descendants, holds that seven men founded Millerton — and that among them was Levi P. Hatch, a druggist.

Here the archives offer something remarkable. Smith's 1882 History of Duchess County, in its business census of Millerton, lists "Levi P. Hatch, druggist, in business here nine years" — placing his drugstore on Main Street by the early 1870s. The same volume records Hatch as secretary of Webotuck Lodge No. 480, Free and Accepted Masons, the village's Masonic lodge. Levi P. Hatch was unquestionably real, unquestionably Millerton's druggist, and a fixture of village life in its first decades.

The surviving records date his business to about two decades after the 1851 naming meeting, and they do not name the full circle of village founders — so whether Hatch stood among an original seven is a matter the documents neither confirm nor deny. His descendants' tradition keeps that story alive, and in a village this small, family memory has always been part of how history gets carried forward.

What is certain: the founders' bet on the railroad paid off, and the names from those first years — Wakeman, Winchell, Trowbridge, Holley, Hatch — built the village Millerton is still living in.

Sources: Smith's History of Duchess County, New York (1882); The Millerton News; Village of Millerton history page; Doughty family account.