The village of Milford was settled in the 1730s when Dutch millwright Tom Quick established residence. It was Quick's death at the hands of Delaware Indians, still smarting over the infamous “Walking Purchase,” that precipitated his son's murderous trail of nearly 100 Indian dead. Tom Quick was commemorated in 1889 with a statue on Broad Street (since removed); his name, though, is recalled in the Tom Quick Inn. In 1793, Philadelphian John Biddis laid out the village on the typical Pennsylvania grid plan of primary streets and secondary alleys with a central town square. Two-quarters of the town square are now the site of the courthouse and jail, while the opposite portions were sold. In 1798, the reserved space was the lure that brought the county seat to Milford when Pike County was still part of Wayne County and it continued as such when Pike was established in 1814. With the arrival of the Delaware and Hudson Canal in the 1820s and rail connections from New York City to nearby Port Jervis in the 1840s, the region was brought into a metropolitan orbit and even before the Civil War had attracted Horace Greeley to found Sylvania Colony, a utopian, free-love community on the model of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Brook Farm. Traces of it still remain in the village of Greeley, thirteen miles northwest of Milford. By midcentury Milford had taken on the role of the contemporary utopia—a resort with small hotels serving a clientele largely drawn from New York.
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