By Eleanor Boudreau
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkno/local-wkno-870474.mp3
Memphis, TN – Even people who have lived in Memphis, Tennessee, their entire lives, don't know how the city got its name. That's because it's a bit of a strange story.
When the Europeans first arrived in North America, they named the land they settled on after their leaders Virginia, for example, was named for Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen" and after places they had been before. The Puritans fled from England and dubbed the region they arrived at "New England." Not the most creative approach, but it was straight forward logically.
Memphis is a different story entirely. It was named after an ancient city in Egypt, but none of the founders had ever been to Egypt. So why Memphis?
I set out in search of reasons, and what I found tells the story not only of Memphis, but of the United States, and what we have come to call "American spirit."
The first piece of the puzzle is entrepreneurship. The three founders of Memphis, General James Winchester, John Overton, and Andrew Jackson, wanted to make a profit off their as-yet-unnamed land. "In order to do that," said John Harkins, a historian at the Memphis University School, "they wanted to use some promotional gimmick."
They named Memphis after one of the great cities of antiquity hoping that the positive association would motivate buyers. This was not a new trick. There are Romes, Troys, and Athens all over the United States.
The other piece of the puzzle is revolutionary zeal. By the time Memphis was named, the Revolutionary War had soured Americans on the British and British names.
The French, on the other hand, had helped us in the war, and very shortly after that began their own revolution, which led to the beheading of a great deal of royalty. Thus, when Memphis was christened, Americans were much more closely ideologically aligned with the French; and the French had recently been to Egypt.
"Napoleon had taken all sorts of scientists and scholars with him, and they were learning, and reporting back, and writing about their findings in Egypt and the magnificence of ancient Egyptian civilization," Harkins explained.
Europeans had thought Egyptian civilization was unsophisticated. The French news was, "a revelation to them," Harkins said.
Still, without Internet, telephones, or any form of instant communication, it took a while for the French information to reach the United States, and General James Winchester.
Winchester, more than any of the other proprietors, followed Napoleon's career, and even named his Tennessee hometown, Cairo.
The Mississippi was thought to be the Nile of North America, and when Winchester surveyed his proprietary on the river he said, "Let's call it Memphis, it will become the Metropolis of the American Nile."
Harkins likes that quote a lot. He titled one of his books about Memphis and Shelby County history Metropolis of the American Nile. But, Harkins says, sometimes Memphians take this name too seriously.
"Building a basketball stadium that's an upright pyramid rather than an inverted pyramid seems to me to have been a conspicuous waste of space," Harkins said.
In the future Harkins suggests Memphians have fun with the name, but leave the pyramids in the past.