Blog 1: What's in a Name? Ask Dr. Cutler

Like most stories worth knowing, it involves lies and betrayal. And it starts in a bar.

Naming Names

I'm a believer in the rhetorical influence of names. I think it is just possible that the citizens of the town of Fairview will have a somewhat different attitude that those living in Mud Run. And I think people (mostly) put some thought into the names they give. If you're going to take the trouble to name some place, or somebody, why wouldn't you have a reason for your choice? 

So it struck me as whimsical and downright delightful that so many place names in Athens County are classically influenced. I mean...Athens. Here? Really? What eighteenth-century pioneer looked at that hilly expanse of dense, sparsly populated woodlands and thought: Athens?

Nominative History

The answers vary a bit depending on where you look for them, but they seem to keep coming back to the Ohio Company. According to Thomas Hoover, in 1786, a group of guys with familiar names took up a round in the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, and made plans to “become adventurers in that delightful region” known as the Ohio Country. I don't know just how delightful Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Parsons, and Manasseh Cutler found the Ohio Country, but it does seem to me that they went there with education on their minds, in addition to settlement. From the first, the Ohio Company lobbied the Continental Congress to specify land in their new-found county for schools: each township was to have one, and two together were to have a university (Beatty and Stone 112). 

The members of the Ohio Company were "men of classical education," so when it came to naming "a harmless pedantry was evinced" (Walker 87). The result was Athens, Rome, Troy, and Carthage. In truth, most of these men fudged a bit on their educational credentials; at the very least, they didn't correct the impression of themselves as men of letters. In fact, Cutler was the only pioneer of those named above who could have packed a college diploma in his deer-skin pack (Yale, no less), though this perhaps makes the others' educational emphasis more laudable. But it also makes me wonder if Cutler had more to do with naming Athens, et al, than the others. 

We know that Cutler was serious about getting his pioneer college off the ground in this new-found county (Hoover 11), a school he dubbed: American University.

Cutler wrote in an 1800 letter:

As the American congress made the grant which is the foundation of the university, no name appeared to me more natural than American University. The sound is natural, easy, and agreeable, and no name can be more respectable. There is a Columbian college, and a Washington college, etc., already in the country, but no American college. I hope the name will not be altered. (Walker 320)

Manasseh Cutler wanted his pioneer college to be a true American school, bound not by city or place name, but rather by nation; this was to be a school for all America. Well, that Ben Franklin of the backwoods didn't get his wish, in a sense. In 1804, when Cutler was  away serving in the House of Representatives, the name was changed to Ohio University. 

What's In a Name?

We gain and lose by this change--as seems to be the case with most changes--Ohio University ties us more tightly to a place, which any place-blogger will tell you is a good thing. But perhaps we lost that sense of representing America in the way Cutler hoped; no matter that we now have students from every state and many countries; in the end, we represent Ohio. Specific. And cut off? Did it change something when we claimed lineal allegiance to Ohio, instead of the wider country?

Ohio University's Cutler Hall, 2010

Well, if nothing else Cutler will always have something to say about the concept of names in his pioneer school, because his own name is solidly attached to the oldest building on campus: Cutler Hall. 


Works Consulted


Beatty, Elizabeth Grover, and Marjorie S. Stone. Getting to Know Athens County. Athens: The Stone House, 1984. 


Hoover, Thomas. The History of Ohio University. Athens: Ohio UP, 1954.


Walker, Charles M. History of Athens County, Ohio. Cincinnati: R. Clarke & Co., 1869.