Borrowed Glory: The Ancient and Distant Names Americans Pinned to the Frontier

Somewhere in western Illinois, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, sits a city named Cairo. It was founded in the 1830s by land speculators who believed—or at least argued—that the geographic position of this particular river junction would make it the commercial capital of the American interior, a city of continental consequence. They named it after the Egyptian capital because the comparison seemed apt: two great rivers, a commanding position, a destiny written in geography. Cairo, Illinois never became what its founders imagined. The comparison to its Egyptian namesake was always more aspiration than description. But the naming itself—the audacity of it, the specific psychological move it represented—reveals something essential about how Americans have always understood the relationship between a place and the story they want that place to tell.

This is a story about seven American towns that borrowed their identities from places their founders had never visited, and what those borrowings reveal about the people who made them.

1. Cairo, Illinois: The Confluence That Was Going to Be Everything

The investors behind Cairo's founding were not naive. They understood that river confluences generated commerce, and the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi was the most strategically significant such point in North America. What they needed was a name that matched the scale of their ambitions, and they reached for the most famous river-junction city in the world.

The Egyptian Cairo sat at the point where the Nile's delta began, commanding the river trade of an entire civilization. The Illinois Cairo was going to command the river trade of an entire continent. The analogy was precise enough to be useful and loose enough to survive scrutiny. That Cairo, Illinois ultimately became a small, economically depressed city—one that has spent the past half-century losing population—does not diminish the psychological clarity of the original naming. The founders were not describing a place. They were issuing a promissory note on behalf of a place, and the currency they used was borrowed prestige from a civilization that had already proven its durability across three thousand years.

2. Ithaca, New York: The Scholar's Fantasy Made Geographic

Ithaca sits in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, in a glacially carved valley that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely remote. It was named in 1804 by Simeon DeWitt, the Surveyor General of New York, who was engaged in the systematic renaming of the state's interior townships and had a classical education and a romantic disposition. He named the township after Odysseus's island home—the place of return, the destination that justified every hardship of the journey.

The choice is psychologically revealing in a way that DeWitt probably did not intend to make transparent. Ithaca in Homer is not a place of arrival so much as a place of longing—the thing the hero is always moving toward, always defining himself against. For settlers carving a life out of the New York wilderness, the name offered a particular kind of comfort: whatever you are enduring now is the journey, and the destination is worth it. The fact that Cornell University was eventually established there—making Ithaca, New York into a genuine seat of learning with some claim to the intellectual associations of its name—is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that names, over time, shape the communities that carry them.

3. Carthage, Missouri: Naming a Place After Its Own Destruction

Carthage, Missouri was incorporated in 1842, roughly two thousand years after the original Carthage was razed by Rome in an act of destruction so thorough that ancient sources claim the ground was salted to prevent anything from growing. It is a peculiar choice of namesake for a community presumably hoping to thrive.

The American fondness for naming towns after Carthage—there are Carthages in Tennessee, Texas, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina—reflects a specific strand of classical education that treated the Punic Wars as a story of civilizational competition and tended to romanticize the loser. Carthage, in the nineteenth-century American imagination, was a great commercial republic destroyed by a militaristic rival. For communities in the American interior that saw themselves as commercial enterprises threatened by larger powers—Eastern capital, federal policy, geographic disadvantage—the identification was not entirely without logic.

Carthage, Missouri was the site of one of the first land battles of the Civil War in 1861. The original Carthage was destroyed. The American one survived. The name outlasted the catastrophe it was, perhaps unconsciously, tempting.

4. Troy, New York: The City That Wanted to Be the Site of Legends

Troy, New York was named in 1789, when the Revolution was fresh and the founders of new American communities were reaching aggressively for names that conferred historical weight. Troy was an obvious choice: it was the city around which the defining epic of Western civilization had been organized, a place whose very name meant consequence, conflict, and the kind of history that gets remembered.

What is interesting about Troy, New York is how seriously it took the comparison. The city became a significant industrial center in the nineteenth century—famous for iron manufacturing, for the detachable collar industry, for a level of commercial energy that gave its boosters some basis for the grandiose comparison. It also became, like its namesake, a city that experienced dramatic decline from a period of apparent invincibility. The psychological pattern is not incidental: communities that name themselves after fallen greatness sometimes seem to be acknowledging, at some level below conscious articulation, that greatness is always temporary.

5. Athens, Georgia: The Classic City and Its Complicated Claim

Athens, Georgia earned its name in 1806 when the state chartered a university there—the University of Georgia—and the founders decided that a city of learning deserved the name of the ancient world's most famous seat of intellectual culture. Athens was where philosophy happened, where democracy was invented, where the Western tradition of rational inquiry began. Athens, Georgia was going to be where the American South cultivated its own intellectual class.

The self-consciousness of this naming is almost painful in its ambition. The founders were not claiming equivalence with Periclean Athens; they were claiming aspiration toward it, which is both more honest and more poignant. Athens, Georgia has in fact produced a disproportionate amount of cultural output for a city of its size—the music scene that emerged there in the 1980s, centered on the University of Georgia, generated bands of genuine international significance. Whether this vindicates the name or merely illustrates that names, applied with sufficient conviction, eventually generate the reality they describe is a question the historical record declines to answer cleanly.

6. Sparta, Wisconsin: The Town That Chose the Other Greeks

Not every classically named American town reached for Athens. Sparta, Wisconsin—incorporated in 1854—chose the militaristic alternative, which tells you something about what its founders valued or feared. Sparta in the ancient world represented discipline, austerity, and an uncompromising commitment to communal survival over individual comfort. For a frontier community trying to establish itself in the Wisconsin interior, those were not irrelevant virtues.

There are more than a dozen American Spartas. They cluster, interestingly, in the Midwest and the upper South—regions where the rhetoric of self-reliance and communal toughness carried particular cultural weight. The choice of Sparta over Athens, wherever it was made, reveals a specific self-conception: we are not the cultivated ones, we are the ones who survive.

7. Rome, New York: The Audacity of the Direct Comparison

And then there is Rome. Rome, New York was named in 1819, and the founders who chose that name were not being subtle. They were placing their community in direct succession to the most powerful political entity in Western history. Not inspired by Rome, not reminiscent of Rome—simply Rome, relocated to the Mohawk Valley.

The audacity of this is worth sitting with. Rome, New York sits near the site of Fort Stanwix, where American forces held off a British siege during the Revolution. The founders who named it were claiming that what had happened there—the defense of a republic against imperial power—was the same category of event as the founding of the original Rome. They were writing their community into a narrative that stretched back to Romulus, and they did so without apparent irony.

This is what naming a place actually is. It is not description. It is not sentiment. It is a claim about what a place means, made at the moment of its legal existence, and it is always—always—more about the people making the claim than about the place itself. The names Americans chose for their frontier communities are a map of their ambitions, their anxieties, their classical educations, and their determination to matter in a world that had not yet decided whether to take them seriously.

History, which is the record of every such determination ever made, suggests the names were doing exactly what they were designed to do.