After the revolutionary war, over 1,500,000 acres in central New York were taken from the Haudenosaunee to form the "Military Tract": land meant for soldiers under a land-grant program. It was divided into 28 townships. It seems that either the surveyor Simeon De Witt or New York Secretary of State Robert Harpur (who had taught at King's College, which would become Columbia University) was responsible for giving these townships classical names. This wasn't an isolated phenomenon: the neoclassical movement was popular at the time, and there were similarly named locations in other states, but New York was unique for having so many classical names added so rapidly. Professor Wilbur Zelinsky studied the adoption of classical place-names and found that during the period before 1820, New York State had a disproportionately high number of such names at 82 out of a total of 179 in the US. Besides occurring spontaneously under the background of neoclassicism and rapid expansion, this naming style also seems to have spread in waves or through diffusion both in New York and across the US, contributing to more such classical names being used. As of Zelinsky's paper in 1967, New York had 150 classical location names out of a total of 2702.5 in the US (Zelinksy gave a value of 0.5 to locally duplicated names). New York is actually now second in terms of classical names: Ohio has a greater number at 158.5, though they were largely named later than the New York locations.

Sources:

Lemak, Joseph. "Roman Grandeur in Central New York: The Classical Tradition in a Nineteenth-Century Pioneer Town." New York History. 89, No 3 (2008)

Zelinsky, Wilbur. "Classical Town Names in the United States: The Historical Geography of an American Idea." Geographical Review. 57, No 4 (1967)

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