Millerton owes its name to a transient engineer

The arrival of the railroad in the Town of North East in 1851 is heralded as the moment Millerton came into being — ushering in a boom period for the area that transformed it from a sparsely populated farming community into a hub of commerce.

That moment was brought about by Sidney Greene Miller and his associate civil engineers in their work as contractors for the New York and Harlem Railroad. After his work, Millerton quickly grew from an insignificant hamlet in North East to the center of the town’s activity within just 25 years.

The railroad’s contribution to the area’s growth, along with Miller’s reported congeniality, as described in a 2001 history of the village produced by the North East Historical Society, led village founders Alexander Trowbridge, Col. John Winchell, Walter Wakeman, Platt Paine and soon-to-be Connecticut Governor Alexander Holley to name Millerton after the civil engineer when it was officially formed in 1875.

But little is known about Miller, beyond the findings uncovered by the North East Historical Society and some investigative work by Sarah Hermans, an amateur historian who grew up in Millerton.

Hermans said public documents on him are sparse, although she found enough to roughly map out his life from records available online.

Miller was born in New York City in 1817, where he was raised by Sylvanus Miller. An obituary for Miller when he died in 1900 said his father, Sylvanus, was a judge, and census records list his profession as “lawyer.”

Miller became a civil engineer, serving as a partner of Morris, Miller and Schuyler when that company was contracted to expand the New York and Harlem railroad north from New York City to Albany. Records show Miller lived in New York City in the early 1850s when the Millerton stop was built, but he didn’t stay in the city long.

Census records indicate Miller left New York State within the decade. He, his wife and three children moved to Westport, Connecticut, in 1854 and then to Virginia in 1856. There, Miller and his wife, Sarah Williamson, had three more children.

Miller and his family were forced out of their home in Alexandria, Virginia, when the United States Army seized the house to use as a hospital during the Civil War.

By 1870, the family had moved to Savannah, Georgia. Documents from Miller’s life are limited, but records indicate that building railroads led him to move frequently. Within just 10 years, Miller and his family, now including a grandson, were recorded as living in Chatham Township in New Jersey in 1880.

Miller did return to New York City at some point before his death in 1900, as shown by death records and an obituary published in The New York Times.

Miller was buried in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Hermans said her research on Miller began by accident while she was researching a friend’s family history. She said she thought Miller would have been a local before she started researching, but soon found out he never even lived in Millerton.

“I was delighted and shocked to find out that he was actually a ‘city person,’” Hermans said.