Paul Singh, owner of Milford’s Wine & Spirit Vault at 101 E. Main St., converted the historic Milford National Bank building into a liquor store. He opened for business in May 2025.
The building, which has also been home to Wilbur Bank and Community Bank, stood vacant for nearly 2 1/2 years. It took Singh 1 1/2 years to obtain a liquor license from the state after he bought the property, he said.
“We wanted to preserve as much as possible of the nostalgia and the heritage of this older building,” Singh said. He retained the ‘cashier’ and ‘teller’ signs and the wooden counter that bank tellers once stood behind. He made it into the check-out counter where customers now pay for the wine or spirits. The new layout prominently features a the silver bank vault. He even kept the original curtains.
“I did not want it to look like a box store,” he said. He wanted to invoke a feeling of the interior being “clean and classy,” he said. He hung the heads of a moose and bison on the walls to make it his own.
Singh and his extended family have lived and done business in Milford for 21 years. His father moved the family here in 2005 from New Jersey and took over the management of the Apple Food Store and gas station at 3634 State Route 28.
“Those early days were challenging. Being the first brown family in the area, we faced hesitancy from the community,” Singh said in a post on Facebook.
“Edward Skillen, who owns the farm stand in Milford, was one of the first individuals to break the ice with my father,” he said.
In the past 21 years, Singh and his family have invested several million dollars in Milford. They built the Apple Inn and Suites, which sits behind the Apple Food Store, from scratch.
The Wine & Spirit Vault is one of Singh’s next steps in creating a thriving local economy in Milford. It sits on one of the four corners at the traffic light on Route 28.
Raj Singh, a cousin of Paul Singh, manages the Wine & Spirits Vault seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. “People come into the liquor store frequently wanting to buy beer,” he said.
New York is one of a few states that require a liquor license to sell wine and spirits, and prohibits the sale of beer in the same location. That confuses some of his out-of-state customers, he said. He sends them down the street to the Apple Food Store.
“Milford is the quintessential rural town. It has one of the longest rivers in the United States running through it. It’s on the corridor to Cooperstown. (Route 28) is the fastest way to get to get to the Hall of Fame. We are very uniquely located here,” Singh said.
Singh also purchased the Elm Inn across the street from his liquor store and owns the vacant corner lot next to the old inn. He also owns a building that sits next to the vacant lots occupied by Sybil’s Yarn Shop and the Milford Corner Store before a fire destroyed them in July 2025.
“I want to see my community thrive,” Singh said. “If Milford is successful, the entire community is successful.”
Singh graduated from SUNY Oneonta in 2010. He was the Business and Economics Student of the Year. He helped the school compete against Princeton, Northwestern, Pace University and NYU to win the Golden Eagle award in a national competition sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank.
“What I appreciate a lot are the older folks of Milford,” he said. “Bob Moore Sr., Pat Lord and Larry Curry have been very supportive of me.” They saw Singh with his textbooks open, studying, while he waited on customers at his father’s Apple Food Store, he said.
“It takes working hard day and night,” to be successful in the rural community, Singh said. “Our net customer base is down by 25% over the last ten years.”
There are several other secrets to Singh’s success. “You have to be dedicated to understanding your customers,” he said. “You have to be personable, respectful and humble.”
“As the community warmed to us, business began to thrive. I became the face of the store, forging personal connections with our customers,” Singh said. “The human touch, something people weren’t finding at larger stores, became our strength.”
Singh was born in Punjab, India and moved to New Jersey when he was five years old.
For more information about the Wine & Spirit Vault, visit https://tinyurl.com/bdy4vz4x.