Super Bowl Sunday is about more than just the sport. From the halftime show to the star-studded commercials, there's always plenty of off-pitch entertainment that keeps people talking long after the final whistle.
But this year, there was one advert in particular that stood out. Jeep roped in Bruce Springsteen for a commercial which, yes, tried to sell us all one of its products, but also sent a message of unity to a divided US.
“There’s a chapel in Kansas, standing on the exact centre of the lower 48. It never closes. All are more than welcome to come meet here, in the middle,” says Springsteen’s voice over, as the camera pans to the modest chapel standing alone in tall grass.
At the exact centre of the lower 48 that Springsteen references sits a small town called Lebanon. A shot in the commercial shows a worn white picket sign displaying the town’s location on the map, bang in the middle of the country.
“Welcome to the centre of the USA,” the sign reads. “Lebanon has souvenirs.”
If you are wondering whether Lebanon, Kansas, has anything to do with the Middle Eastern country, the answer is: sort of.
Lebanon, Kansas, is named after a city a couple of states over in Kentucky. This Lebanon, renowned for its Ham Days Festival and Tractor Show, was a nightlife hotspot in the 1960s and ‘70s, and, at the last census, was home to a little more than 5,000 people.
Established in 1814, the city took inspiration from the Bible when it came to naming the area, choosing Lebanon thanks to its abundance of cedar trees – the national emblem of its namesake country.
But those are not the only two Lebanons in the US. In fact, more than 40 places take their name from the country.
Some of them are tiny, deserted towns and villages, while others are flourishing communities.
Across all of the US's Lebanons, the answer is the same. Thanks to the numerous mentions of Lebanon's cedar trees in the Old Testament of the Bible, many religious early settlers in the US saw lush green areas and took naming inspiration from the descriptions of the Lebanon they had read about.
As a result, most of the Lebanons in the US are in the eastern states, where many early Puritan settlers made their homes.
In fact, in 2017, Lebanese photographer Fadi BouKaram made it his mission to visit all the places across the US that bore the name of his homeland, blogging about it as he went.
For five months, he drove alone in his camper van across the country, documenting pictures and findings from each Lebanon he ticked off.
“For some reason, America has so many cities and towns called Lebanon,” he writes in a 2016 blog post.
“I found out about this by accident one time when I was googling Lebanon (my country), and I got a link to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, which got me wondering. Then I started scouring the online databases the US has of its city names, and I found over 50. But here’s the thing. Sometimes names of cities change in the US, or they lose their populations, so of the 50-plus I found, there’s about 43 still standing today. For example, the two Lebanons in Texas are now ghost towns.”
BouKaram’s research also uncovered that, in 1955, the mayors of seven of these towns were invited by Lebanon’s then-president Camille Chamoun to visit the country.
"They did," BouKaram writes. "Spending two weeks in Beirut and touring the country, and then when they left, they were each given a cedar sapling (a true cedar of Lebanon, i.e. cedrus libani) that they took to their towns and supposedly planted there. I want to find out if these trees still exist today."
Among his discoveries along the way, BouKaram found Arabic Michelin signs in a transport museum in Butte, Montana, flags and coats of arms bearing his county's name, and of course, one of the cedars of Lebanon which he sought out to find.
