Metropolis: A Big Name for a Small River Town
Near Metropolis, Illinois
You are in Metropolis, a small city on the north bank of the Ohio River in far southern Illinois, about thirteen miles upstream from Paducah, Kentucky. The name is the first thing you need to understand about this place, because the name tells you everything about its founders and almost nothing about the reality of what they built. In the spring of eighteen thirty-nine, a Pittsburgh merchant and a local landowner laid out a town on Ohio River bottomland and called it Metropolis.
It is a Greek word meaning great city, mother city, the capital of a civilization. They chose it because they believed this spot on the river would grow into something enormous. The Ohio River was the main highway of the American interior in that era, a broad, powerful waterway moving people and goods between the eastern cities and the expanding frontier.
Metropolis sat at a natural crossing point, where the ferry moved travelers between the free state of Illinois and the slave state of Kentucky directly across the water. The founders were not being grandiose for the sake of vanity. They were making a prediction, and they believed it.
The great city never arrived. What grew instead was a county seat, a market town, a community of farmers and river workers and railroad workers. Massac County built its courthouse here, and Metropolis served as a modest but stable center for the region.
The ground beneath it had been inhabited long before anyone named it. The Mississippian culture, the mound-building civilization that flourished across the American Midwest and South roughly one thousand years ago, left traces in this part of the Ohio Valley that archaeologists have studied for generations. People had been living along this bend of the river for centuries before either Kentucky or Illinois had a name.
Today Metropolis is known across the country not for its river crossing or its courthouse or its original ambitions. It is known because in nineteen seventy-two, the Illinois General Assembly declared it the official hometown of Superman. A fifteen-foot bronze statue of the Man of Steel stands near the courthouse.
The grandiose name, it turned out, suited the legend if not the size.
