Athens, Ohio: The First University Town on the Frontier

When Congress created the Northwest Territory in seventeen eighty-seven, it did something historically unusual: it set aside public land specifically for education. The Land Ordinance of seventeen eighty-five had already established the township grid that would define the Midwest, but the Northwest Ordinance went further, declaring that schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. Two townships of federal land in Ohio were reserved for a university.

Ohio University, founded in eighteen oh four in Athens, is the result. It is the oldest university in the Northwest Territory and the oldest public university west of the Allegheny Mountains, though those claims overlap with rivals. What is not disputed is that Athens was platted specifically as a college town on a New England model: the university at its center, the town built around it, the idea being that learning and civic life would be inseparable.

The founders named it Athens after the Greek city, the same impulse that named streets and counties all across the new republic after classical antiquity, an attempt to invest the American experiment with the moral weight of ancient democracy.

Athens sits in the Hocking River valley of southeastern Ohio, in the poorest corner of the state. Appalachian Ohio does not look like the rest of Ohio. The terrain is hilly and forested, the economy historically dependent on coal and now largely on the university. Ohio University enrolls roughly twenty-five thousand students and has long served as both the economic engine of Athens County and its cultural lifeline.

The university has produced a notable list of alumni, including Matt Lauer, George Voinovich, Roger Ailes, and the founders of several media companies. But its deepest significance is structural: it proved that you could plant a university in a wilderness and grow a city around it, which is exactly what the framers of the Northwest Ordinance intended.