The name of the town is derived from the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Tully was within the former Central New York Military Tract, an area which the federal government reserved to use for granting plots of land as bounty and pay to soldiers and veterans for their service during the American Revolution.

One of the assistant surveyors, being a classical scholar and professor at Kings College (Columbia), assigned names from Roman generals and statesmen, and Greek men of letters.

[2] This area had been occupied for centuries by the Onondaga people, one of the first Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee.

Much was sold and granted to settlers and speculators, and European Americans began to flood into western New York.

It became the site for annual sessions of an educational nature, similar to those at the celebrated Chautauqua, New York, which is situated on the lake of that name.

The celebrated Tully Lakes, forming an unbroken chain of natural water gems, consist of Tully (Big), Green, Crooked, Jerry's and Mirror Lakes, of which the first named is the largest and most prominent.

Schools in Tully date back to Miss Ruth Thorpe who established a place of learning in Timothy Walker's barn in 1801.

The district received its first charter from the Board of Regents to form a high school in 1898.