The reason there is a Williamsville is a road crossing a creek. The Buffalo-Batavia road (laid along the Great Iroquois Trail, then improved by surveyors into what people called the Buffalo Road) had to get over Ellicott Creek, and it did that at the one spot where the creek also dropped far enough to turn a wheel. Traffic and waterpower in the same quarter mile. That combination makes a town whether anybody plans it or not.
Williams Mills
Jonas Williams bought several hundred acres at the crossing and started building. A mill in 1811, then more mills, a tannery, a distillery. People called the place Williams Mills, and Williams Mills wore down over a couple of decades into Williamsville. The village was formally incorporated on November 4, 1850, a full four decades after the mill was running, which tells you plainly which one was in charge.
A word on the name of this shirt. "The Mill Village" is an affectionate, informal name for Williamsville and the name this design goes by. It is not an official motto and the village's own history page doesn't use it. It stuck because it is simply accurate: the mills came first, and everything else arranged itself around them.
The winter the army moved in
Williamsville's second act was the War of 1812, and the village got a heavier share of it than its size suggests. A state marker at Main and Evans, erected in 1939, puts it about as plainly as a marker can:
Along Garrison Rd to Creek and extending southeast were log barracks of Gen. Smyth's army during winter of 1812 and '13.
Those barracks, between Garrison Road and Ellicott Creek, were later put to use as a hospital. A formal hospital cantonment followed on July 29, 1814, on roughly ninety acres of leased farmland just outside the village, where soldiers wintered in huts of about twelve to sixteen feet square with a stone fireplace at the back. What killed men there was mostly not the British. Typhus, rheumatism, and fever moving through a camp beside a marsh did the work, and it did it at scale: research by J. A. Buscaglia, who located the site from stone fireplace remnants visible in 1927 aerial photographs, counts more than 460 deaths at the cantonment.
Winfield Scott at the Evans House
In the spring of 1813, General Winfield Scott headquartered at the Evans House on Main Street with an army put at 5,000 to 6,000 men in and around the village. Set that against a settlement that would not bother incorporating for another thirty-seven years and you get the scale of the disruption.
The Evans House itself was the oldest building in town: a seven-room log house raised in 1799 by John Thomson, used in turn as a tavern, an inn, and a Holland Land Company office, and the site of the first recorded marriage in Erie County on April 28, 1804. The Evans family held it until 1925. It came down in 1955. There is a marker at 5641 Main Street and nothing else.
The cemetery on Aero Drive
The men who died in the Williamsville hospital were buried in a small plot on what is now Aero Drive, roughly half a mile east of Wehrle, today inside Cheektowaga rather than the village. The Buffalo Historical Society still owns it. Its tablet is worth quoting in full, because of one word in it:
This tablet is erected by the Buffalo Historical Society in honor of the American and British soldiers of the War of 1812 who died in the military hospital at Williamsville, New York and were buried here in 1814 and 1815.
And British. The hospital took enemy prisoners as patients, and the same ground took them as dead alongside the men who had been shooting at them. It is a quiet, unglamorous piece of decency sitting in a small plot off a suburban road that most Buffalonians drive past on their way to the airport.
What's left to see
The barracks are gone, the Evans House is gone, the hospital ground is a subdivision. What survives is the geography that caused all of it: the creek, the crossing, and the mill. The building is still on Spring Street (that story is the Williamsville Water Mill) and the drop that powered it is Glen Falls, at the eastern edge of Glen Park. The rest of the region is laid out in the full town-by-town guide.
Wear it
The Mill Village tee is for the town rather than any one building in it: a creek crossing that became a mill, a mill that became a name, and a name that outlasted an army camped on top of it. It's part of the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt.