The Bolivarians of Ohio

These days, the closest you get to Bolivarianism in Ohio is probably buying gas at Citgo, owned by Petroleos de Venezuela SA - that is, the country's 'Bolivarian' revolutionary government. The place names of central Ohio, however, are littered with references to the man, from Bolivar Avenue in Cleveland, to a bunch of roads spread across several counties, to a little town named Bolivar down near the interstate (which the local bike shop owner assures me will soon have the only canal towpath trailhead within a mile of an interstate). 

The great thing is that all these places are pronounced to rhyme with 'Oliver', following the delightful midwestern logic of inventing bizarre pronunciations for European names (think of the several 'Milans', for instance, pronounced 'my-lun'). 

My historian's guess is that Bolivar's popularity in Ohio came from the fact that this part of the state was settled by whites in the mid-1820s, just after the revolutions that freed latin America from Spanish rule. Maybe they saw in Simón Bolivar the freedom-loving frontiersman they thought themselves to be; an Andrew Jackson del sur, quisás? I suspect that this was the first, and probably last, latin American revolutionary movement that was widely popular in Ohio.