Clio was named for the Greek muse of history — by the women at a hotel party

A town named for a Greek muse usually got there by way of some learned founder with a classical streak. Clio got there by a vote of the women at a party. The settlement north of Flint first went by “Varney,” after an early grain buyer, and might have stayed that way if a hotel-keeper called Colonel Hill hadn’t taken a liking to a grander name. He wanted the place called Clio, after the muse the old Greeks assigned to history and heroic poetry — one of the nine sisters said to inspire learning and the arts.

For a while nobody humored him. Then Hill made his case one evening to a gathering at his own hotel, and the women in the room simply declared it settled: Varney would be Clio. The men, the story goes, did not get a vote, and the name has held ever since.

The railroad gave the village its body while the muse gave it a name. The Flint and Pere Marquette line pushed through in 1861, and the depot pulled in lumber, grain, and people the way these little rail towns did. Clio incorporated as a village in 1873 and grew into a small city on the road north out of Flint.

It is a fine bit of civic personality — a town that could have been named for a crop, a railroad, or a man’s last name, and instead carries the name of history itself, handed down by a roomful of women at a hotel who had simply heard enough.