Ovid, Michigan, is named for a Roman poet — by way of New York

A farm village on the east edge of Clinton County shares its name with a poet who died in exile on the Black Sea two thousand years ago. Nobody in Ovid set out to honor Roman literature, though. The name took a long, roundabout road to get here.

When settlers reached this spot in the 1830s, one of them — William Swarthout — named the new place after the town he’d left behind in New York: Ovid, in the Finger Lakes country. And that Ovid got its name during a strange fad. In the early 1800s, New York’s land surveyors christened a whole cluster of frontier townships with names lifted from Greek and Roman antiquity — Ovid, Romulus, Ulysses, Hector, Cato, all neighbors on the map. So a Roman poet’s name rode west in a settler’s memory and landed on Michigan farmland.

Ovid the village was a creature of the railroad. The first store opened in 1856, the post office in 1857, and the place was platted in 1858 along the Detroit and Milwaukee line that ran from Detroit toward Grand Rapids. Incorporated in 1869, it filled up fast with the works a railroad town needed — a flour mill, a foundry, a carriage shop, a tannery, hotels for travelers stepping off the trains. The township itself had been organized back in 1840, also carrying the borrowed name.

The trains are long gone, but their grade survives as the rail trail that now runs through town toward St. Johns. The poet, meanwhile, would probably have enjoyed the joke: Ovid spent his last years banished to a rough frontier outpost far from home, writing letters about how far it was from anything. His name ended up doing roughly the same thing — carried to the far edge of the known world and settled into the quiet, where it’s been ever since.