The New York party that named Ionia for ancient Greece

About 63 people loaded up in Herkimer County, New York, in 1833 and went looking for new ground in the Michigan Territory. Their leader was Samuel Dexter. The place they stopped became Ionia — a bluff above the Grand River, where a Native village had long camped each season. They pitched tents the first night and got to work.

The name is the surprising part. No river or settler called Ionia stands behind it. Dexter reached back to the ancient world and borrowed it. Ionia was a region of Greek-speaking cities on the western coast of what’s now Turkey. Early-1800s Americans loved to drape classical names over raw frontier townsites. That’s how Michigan also got an Athens, a Sparta, and a Romeo. Ionia is one of the names that stuck and grew a real city around it.

Dexter didn’t settle for borrowed glory and then sit still. By that fall he had a sawmill running on a creek west of the settlement. Within a few years he added a gristmill to grind flour and meal, after rerouting a brook for the water power he needed. The county that formed around the town took the same name. Ionia became its seat of government, and it still is, with the courthouse to prove it.

Stand on the high ground downtown and picture that first night in 1833. A few dozen people from upstate New York, tents on the riverbank, naming their new home after a string of marble cities — cities that had risen and fallen on the far side of the world more than two thousand years before.