Milton: Named for a Poet Because the Post Office Said No
Near Tacoma, Washington
The town straddling the King and Pierce County line got its name by accident. In the early eighteen nineties, a lumber mill opened on a hill above the Puyallup Valley and the handful of families who settled around it simply called their community Mill Town. When they applied for a post office, federal authorities rejected the two-word name as too generic.
Casting about for an alternative, local tradition says someone landed on the poet John Milton, and the name stuck. The Milton Land Company platted the townsite in the early nineteen hundreds, and the Interurban Railway connecting Seattle and Tacoma ran nearby, cementing the town's role as a quiet junction community. Milton incorporated in the early nineteen hundreds.
