Inez Milholland is pictured at a women's suffrage parade in New York City on May 3, 1913. (Provided photo — George Grantham Bail Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

A mountain in the Essex County town of Lewis has been formally renamed after a famed women’s suffragist who partly grew up there.

Mount Discovery was officially renamed Mount Inez, in honor of Inez Milholland, by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names Thursday. The town of Lewis had renamed the mountain for Milholland more than 100 years ago, but it was never made official at the federal level.

“Today’s approval of Mount Inez by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names was a joint effort by many,” Nancy Duff Campbell, a part-time Lewis resident who backed the proposal to rename Mount Discovery as Mount Inez, said in a statement Thursday. Campbell is a founder of the National Women’s Law Center.

“These collective efforts have secured a lasting monument to one of Lewis’ most notable heroines and a significant U.S. historical figure, Inez Milholland,” she said.

The mountain — which reaches about 1,552 feet in elevation — had been known locally as Mount Inez since at least December 1916, following Milholland’s death at the age of 30 in Los Angeles, according to an article at that time in the now-defunct Elizabethtown Post newspaper.

Milholland had been on a cross-country train trip to shore up support for candidates who backed the 19th Amendment, which guarantees the rights of citizens to vote regardless of gender, when she collapsed while delivering a speech. She died a few weeks later, on Nov. 25, 1916, and on Dec. 5 her body was laid to rest in Lewis, according to the Post.

“I have long admired Inez Milholland, not just for her contributions to women’s suffrage, but also for her work to promote civil rights, labor rights, prison reform and world peace,” Campbell said. “I knew about the effort to rename Mount Discovery as Mount Inez after her death but was mystified by the fact that today’s maps and other descriptions of the mountain continued to refer to it as Mount Discovery. I hoped that historical and legal research would provide the answer.”

Campbell discovered that although the mountain was named in her honor locally, it was never changed at the federal level. After learning that, with support from local officials and residents, she submitted a proposal to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to formally change Mount Discovery’s name to Mount Inez.

“As the nation prepares to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment next year, it is especially fitting to recognize the contributions of Inez Milholland, a lawyer and one of the most prominent suffragists of her time,” Campbell said.

The mountain was initially named “Discovery” because it was “a famous point to watch the British fleet duing the Revolutionary War,” according to “Whispering Mountains,” a history of Lewis written by Marilyn Cross in 2005.

Milholland’s father, John E. Milholland, was the inventor of the pneumatic tube. He purchased a part of Mount Discovery sometime before 1900 and established the Meadowmount Ranch. The Meadowmount Ranch was later leased by Ivan and Judith Galamian in 1944, who established the Meadowmount School of Music there.

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(Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly placed Lewis in Essex County and said Milholland grew up in Lewis, when she also grew up in New York City.)