Cynthiana, Indiana: Settlers Named It for Home

Cynthiana in Posey County was laid out in March of eighteen seventeen by William Davis, and the name he chose tells the whole story of how American small towns spread westward. On September twenty-fifth, eighteen fifteen, a group of forty-four settlers had left Cynthiana, Kentucky, and made their way north across the Ohio River into Indiana. They brought the name with them, planting it in new soil the way emigrants always did, as both a memory and a declaration of where they came from.

More families from the same Kentucky community followed over the next several years. The town incorporated in eighteen ninety-six after nearly eighty years as an unincorporated settlement. It remains a small community in the agricultural bottomlands near Evansville.