More Names Upon the Land - The Midwest

I recently attended the Society of Midwest Historians conference in Des Moines, Iowa, and it got me thinking about how we came to define the Midwest. Here are a few of my incomplete thoughts on the region stimulated by the two-day conference.

Before the region had a name, European settlers in the East generally referred to the land west of the Allegheny Mountains as the “Frontier.” But in 1787, the land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River was designated as the “Northwest” by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This region included Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and the northeastern portion of Minnesota. As the United States expanded westward, the term “Old Northwest” emerged to distinguish it from the Pacific Northwest. But the territory of the Northwest Ordinance remained the starting point for what we now call the Midwest. Interestingly, the physical starting point of the region is represented by historical markers in East Liverpool, Ohio, where the first survey was conducted during George Washington’s administration. These markers refer to the area as both the "Gateway to the Northwest" and the "Beginning of the Western Lands."

 

 The term "Northwest" was eventually shortened to terms like the “Old West,” the “Great West,” and simply “the West”—a term famously used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. By the time of the Civil War, “Middle West” was in common usage, though other terms, such as "Central States," appeared in 1872 school geography textbooks. Interestingly, Kentucky was included in some of these definitions. 

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner popularized the term "Midwest," which became the standard reference for most Americans by the 1930s.The boundaries of the Midwest have been defined in various ways over time, leading to differing opinions about what exactly constitutes the region. Abraham Lincoln referred to the area as “the great interior region,” while John Frederick, the first editor of Midland magazine in the early 20th century, defined it expansively as “the great valley between the Alleghenies and the Rockies.”

Other terms like “Heartland” and “the Middle” have been used to describe the region.

The Midwest has been defined not only by geographers, but also by artists (like Grant Wood), writers (such as Sherwood Anderson), historians (including Frederick Jackson Turner), culinary historians (like Cynthia Clampitt), and public opinion, as evidenced by a poll conducted by Emerson College.

 

 

Images  

1. Historical Marker of East Liverpool, Ohio Historical Society

2.  Map from Bernard DeVoto's Course of Empire (1952)

3. Map from B.A. Hindsdale's The Old Northwest (1888)

4. Map from Compton New Common School Geography (1872)