The Cayuga people, one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, occupied the land at the head of Cayuga Lake for centuries. Indigenous peoples were largely forced out of Upstate New York by the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition in 1779. The land that would become the Town of Danby was a part of the Watkins and Flint Purchase, a 336,380 acre patent granted by New York State to numerous eastern investors in 1794. Danby's first European-American settlers, including Isaac and John Dumond and Jacob and Joseph Yaple, arrived in 1795.