North America has plenty of towns and cities named after towns and cities in Europe (New York, NY after the English York; Paris, TX after the French Paris; and so on).
Conversely, are there any towns or cities in Europe that are named after towns or cities in North America? Naturally these would be comparatively rare simply because most towns and cites in Europe predate Western colonization of the Americas, though I suspect there must be at least a few. Could we find the largest one (in terms of population)?
(Note that I’m not interested in hearing about individual buildings, streets, squares, neighbourhoods, etc., as I’m sure there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of those.)
This is going to be a challenge, as you’re asking for ‘new towns’ - towns that were founded after the US, of which there are vanishingly few (most towns have at least some roots as a village pre-USA). The other challenge is that if you’re creating a town from scratch, is it likely it will be named after a foreign place, unless there’s loads of immigrants from that place? Most people call towns after something that is meaningful or sentimental to the local populace - hence so many European town names in the US.
I’ve been through Pennsylvania, Gloucestershire, but Wikipedia is unsure whether it is named after the US state. I suspect that even if it isn’t, folk etymology had a hand in shaping its name to conform to the state, like the traffic circle in Esher that was originally nicknamed Silly Islands eventually morphed into Scilly Isles.
Ironically with regards to your size requirement, the Wikipedia disambiguation page for Pennsylvania lists a neighborhood of Exeter that definitely was named after the state, and is probably much larger in population than the tiny village of Pennsylvania.
Well, you could have an existing European town renamed in honour of some American place. Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia, was, after World War One, briefly named (or proposed to be named) Wilsonov, in honour of US President Woodrow Wilson (whose propagation of self-determination for the peoples of Austria-Hungary had led to the independence of Slovakia). But that’s an American person, not an American settlement.
Similarly, in the late 18th and early 19th century, an American named Benjamin Thompson rose to prominence as an advisor to the Prince-Elector, later King, of Bavaria, and was ennobled as a count in recognition of that. The title he got was Count of Rumford, after a place in New Hampshire where he had lived for a while. There’s a number of things such as streets in Bavaria named after Rumford, so you could say these things are indirectly named after the NH place, but to my knowledge there’s no town or neighbourhood in a larger city among the things named after him.
My best guess would be that some US military base somewhere in Europe was named after a place in America and then, when the American military withdrew, converted into a civilian residential area but retaining the previous name. I couldn’t find an example, but I wouldn’t rule out that it exists.
Things like this have definitely happened at the sub-municipal level. The German state of Hesse once hosted an American military base, which set up a barracks complex for soldiers and their families. It was named Lincoln Village and was located at the edge of the city of Darmstadt. Some decades after the base was decommissioned, the city took over the barracks and incorporated them as a new suburb, retaining the name (or maybe slightly Germanizing it to Lincoln-Siedlung; I can’t remember). Now, the barracks were named after an American person, not an American city, though it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the same thing has happened somewhere to a barracks that was named after a place in the US.
Same thing in Heidelberg: “Patrick Henry Village” has basically become “Patrick-Henry-Siedlung”. They’ve even kept the street names (“San Juan Hill Street”, “Alamo Circle”, etc). It’s owned by the (German) government and is now being used to process refugees.
I suspect that if it eventually returns to the private sector it will be renamed.
There’s also a forest near a little village I used to live nearby in Westphalia, which the locals call Amerika, but that’s not an official name, unlike Amerika, Saxony.
There’s a Washington West Sussex, but not idea how it was named. Our Washington is named after a former Englishman with an established family in England, so that place easily could have been named first. Washington, Tyne and Wear is clearly named prior to the American Washingtons.
Washington is believed to have been a saxon settlement of the Wasa (or Wassa) tribe. The modern name “Washington” comes from “Wasa inga tun” or “town of the sons of Wasa”.
In 947 Washington was “granted to Eadric” by King Eadred and it included the areas of Horsham and “Gotwick” (probably today’s Gatwick). In 1066 the manor belonged to Gyrth, the brother of King Harold. In that year, at the battle of Hastings…
There’s probably plenty of suburbs, districts etc. named after things from American pop-culture, but they’re folk etymologies rather than official names.