Robert Barnes, Wabash College
Communities around the world claim the nickname of Athens. There are Athenses of the North (Edinburgh), the South (Adelaide), the East (Madurai), America (Boston), South America (Bogota), etc. Yet, nowhere are there more Athenses than the American Midwest.
The frequent choice of this classicizing nickname in this region is partly motivated by a confluence of historical and cultural factors. In the early 1800s, America, like Europe was under the classicizing influence of the Romantic movement. This influence was further catalyzed by the Greek War for Independence, leading to the Greek Revival in America. This all coincided with a mass migration westward. By 1840, Cincinnati was the 6th largest city in the nation, and over 5 million people (30 percent of the country’s population) had settled across the Appalachians. When they did, they branded their settlements with lofty classical names, such as Troy, Rome, Elysium, Arcadia, etc. This onomastic habit was so prevalent that cultural geographers still label the region of Illinois, Indiana, and the surrounding states as the “Classical Belt” of America. And in addition to classically named settlements, many Midwestern towns began to nickname themselves as the Athens or the West (Lexington, KY), the Athens of Indiana (Crawfordsville), the Athens of the Great Prairie (Columbus, IN), etc. So popular was moniker that neighboring boomtowns, such as Cincinnati and Lexington and others, actually quarreled over who better deserved it.
In this paper, I examine newspapers, travelogues, and other forms of documentation of the period in order to establish why the sobriquet, “Athens of…”, so appealed to these communities in the American West. What I argue is that the nickname helped ‘anchor’[1] these newfangled frontier towns to a familiar European tradition while, at the same time, marking a degree of regional exceptionalism. This semantic give and take is afforded by the genitival formula “Athens of x,” where the x stands for the frontier and Athens stands for a proto-European tradition; to call one’s community the Athens of Indiana, the Athens of the West, or the Athens of the Great Prairie is to say not only that the community participates in a greater classical tradition (a tradition that native populations pointedly did not share in) but also that the same classical tradition participates in a greater idea of the newly settled West, Indiana, Great Prairie, etc. This semantic work was especially useful for frontier communities that were not only new and growing rapidly, but also because they were eager to control their image, which at the time was met with either wonder or disgust from those in Europe and the eastern seaboard. In short, towns on the American frontier in the early 1800s used the nickname of ‘Athens’ as a token of legitimacy, one that aimed to brand the American frontier as a new and exceptional member of an established European tradition that stretches back to classical antiquity.
[1] For this idea of anchoring, see the Anchoring Innovation research initiative: https://anchoringinnovation.nl.