At the time, both Europe and North America had a rekindling of interest in the classical era — a renaissance of the renaissance, so to speak. But that neoclassicist revival gained an extra layer of meaning in the newly independent United States, wrote William Zelinsky in a 1967 article in Geographical Review:
“[T]here was an abrupt crystallization of the classical idea in the young Republic’s newer settlements and the notion of a New Athens and a New Rome was becoming a lively one, supplementing the long immanent doctrine of a New Zion. The concurrent French Revolution, linking as it did the image of the classical world with republican principles, probably gave the new fad added impetus.”
That’s how the Military Tract — developed soon after the Revolutionary War, and specifically for its veterans — turned into a hotbed of classical place names. The neoclassicist “fad” also influenced building styles. And so the Military Tract also became “the zone of maximum intensity for the early development of Greek Revival architecture and for the penetration of this style into vernacular buildings.”
As the American frontier expanded, the classic style of naming towns and building houses spread from the Military Tract throughout the rest of the country. As these maps show, the spread was somewhat uneven.
America, land of (almost) a hundred Troys
Some classical names turned out more popular than others. For example: Syracuse (in New York) only chose that name (in 1820) because Corinth was already taken. Listing the most popular localities with classical names, Zelinsky finds that Troy, with 97 occurrences, was the most widely used place name. Here’s the entire top 10:
- Troy (97)
- Eureka (83.5)
- Anyplace ending in -polis or -ople (68.5)
- Etna (57)
- Antioch (56)
- Athens (54.5)
- Rome (54.5)
- Albion (51)
- Arcadia (50)
- Palmyra (49)
The list includes people and places from Antiquity, but also Greek letters such as Alpha (39) and Omega (29). There are about a dozen Utopias in the U.S. and half a dozen Coronas.
The ten least popular place names on the list (each with just five occurrences) are: Athen(i)a, Brutus, Cadmus, Caesar, Ephesus, Nestor, Pandora, Parnassus, Patmos, and Theta.
The U.S. is not the only settler country with the need to come up with names for thousands of new villages, towns, and cities. However, the wholesale adoption of Greek and Roman names for places is something particular to the U.S., and repeated only on a much smaller scale in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the countries of Latin America.