Names and nicknames have particular significance in helping to understand
the time and place of a community, often documenting the founding or important
points in history of a given settlement. Moreover, the practice of naming
or nicknaming a community, and the names and nicknames themselves, establish
boundaries as well as rules which dictate appropriate cultural behavior
and activity for communities and individuals within those communities.
In the case of Lexington, Kentucky, oral tradition maintains that, in 1775, a band of explorers named the community upon receiving news of victorious American troops at the Battle of Lexington, Massachusetts in the Revolutionary War. And while this initial naming of Lexington is quite germane to the community's identity, a nickname first coined in the early nineteenth century -- Lexington as "the Athens of the West" -- had and continues to have a more pervasive impact on the representation of Lexington as a location with significant cultural collateral in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What are the various meanings for the nickname? Is this nickname justified? How does Lexington's nicknaming fit in context with the dozen early nineteenth-century communities in the trans-Appalachian and trans-Mississippi frontiers which share some form of the same nickname? What does the nickname tell about the cultural production of the community in the simultaneous contexts of republicanism and neo-classicism?
Given the nature of early nineteenth-century settlement patterns, the nickname "Athens" presents a special challenge in its use. On the one hand, "Athens" represents an atavistic yearning for the past -- a time and space of "true" democracy and perceived cultural refinement. At the same time, "Athens" characterizes as a yearning for a not-yet-articulated utopian future -- a time and space of great American culture and communities. The "Athens" nickname assumes additional complexities in the western geography of the Early Republic -- a wide frontier of multiple facets with both physical and temporal attributes in flux and under tremendous negotiation -- a geography where a cultured "Athens" is built in contrast to a backwards "frontier."
Numerous early nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements, traveler
accounts, city directories, probate inventory records, and other contemporary
sources offer evidence of diversified industry in Lexington. These same
resources add significantly to a contemporary understanding of the substantial
cosmopolitan aspirations of this Central Kentucky community in the years
of the Early Republic.