Aurora's locally cherished "The View" is a 180-degree vista and an iconic part of the town's agricultural heritage, offering sunset views and westward sightlines over unbroken meadow and forest. The Closs family began farming this land in 1828, when the Town of Aurora was in its infancy, and for nearly two centuries generations of the family stewarded it through dairy farming, crop production, and haying. As farming there neared its end, the Closs family and adjoining property owners the Sievenpipers wanted the land permanently protected as a scenic meadow, wildlife habitat, and community asset long enjoyed by generations of Western New Yorkers. In 2013 Aurora acquired the property, and the Western New York Land Conservancy was granted a permanent conservation easement; after a three-year cooperative effort led by the Friends of Mill Road and supported by private landowners, local businesses, charitable foundations, and hundreds of individual donors, by 2014 a roadside pull-off and 60-acre scenic panorama had been safely opened for visitors and protected in perpetuity. The property's ecological communities include a sedge meadow, vernal pool, maple-beech mesic forest, and hemlock northern hardwood forest, and its wildflowers, grasses, sedges, and trees provide habitat for wildlife including red-tailed hawk, turkey, eastern bluebird, bobolink, eastern meadowlark, red fox, white-tailed deer, monarch butterfly, fall asters, and common milkweed.