Homer, New York, First Stop in Cortland County

The village of Homer sits in the heart of the Finger Lakes hill country as one of the oldest English-speaking settlements in this part of New York. In seventeen ninety-one, Amos Todd, his sister Rhoda Beebe, and her husband Joseph Beebe paddled up the Tioughnioga River from Windsor, New York, seeking farmland near the head of navigation. They were the first white settlers in what is now Cortland County.

The name Homer was assigned by Robert Harpur, a clerk in the state surveyor general's office who drew on his classical education when naming townships across the Central New York Military Tract, land set aside to pay veterans of the Revolutionary War. The village was incorporated in eighteen thirty-five and is a village in Cortland County today.