South Vienna: Austria on the National Road

In eighteen thirty-three, a settler named John H. Dynes laid out a village in Clark County, Ohio, and gave it the name Vienna, said to honor the Austrian capital. When the National Road arrived nearby a few years later, the settlement gained traffic and staying power.

The name shifted twice. A post office called Vienna Cross Roads opened in eighteen forty to distinguish it from other Viennas, and in nineteen oh nine the post office settled on South Vienna, the name it carries today. It is a modest crossroads village, but its Austrian namesake makes it one of the more unlikely acts of frontier imagination in western Ohio.