Urbana: The Polite City on Shawnee Ground

Urbana, Ohio, was laid out in eighteen oh five by Colonel William Ward, a Virginian who chose the name from a Latin root tied to the city and to urbanity, which struck him as an aspirational name for a new county seat on the Ohio frontier. Champaign County, of which Urbana is the seat, was organized the same year, carved from Greene and Franklin counties. The land had been Shawnee country, and Simon Kenton, the celebrated frontiersman who had once been held captive by the Shawnee, settled in the Mad River valley near Urbana in seventeen ninety-nine and later served as a brigadier general in the state militia.

During the War of eighteen twelve, General William Hull established a training camp here, briefly making Urbana a staging point for the northern campaigns. The county name Champaign comes from the French word for open plain.