Well, there are scores of European settlements that got their present-day name post-USA, via getting city rights etc. Many of those were named not based on the existing local place names. Don’t know of any that were named after NA places, though.
I know the OP excluded street names, but there’s a tiny street in Toledo, Spain called “Calle de Toledo de Ohio” (Toledo Ohio Street). Been there.
Edit: Deleted.
There’s probably town twinning, aka jumelage, behind this. Most towns or cities that are in such a twinning relationship will have, somewhere, a street named after the sister place.
Philadelphia is an ancient name. Amman, Jordan was called Philadelphia in Roman times. If you find a town name Philadelphia, it may not be named after the city in Pennsylvania.
According to this article, Germany’s Philadelphia was named for the U.S. city (though it could well be a folk etymology):
Several of the families lured to the area were disappointed because the soil was fine sand, not much good for farming. So they decided to do what many Germans had done before – head for Philadelphia in America.
The trouble was, the Prussian King Frederick, later dubbed “the Great,” wouldn’t let them. He needed all the able-bodied men for his army. So he told them: “What you want in America you can have right here. You can make your own Philadelphia.”
About a dozen families got land grants from the king’s own estate, and the area was called Neu, or New, Philadelphia. The “new” was later dropped; no one knows when or why.
ETA: “The people here love to tell the story of their village, although some concede it may be as much legend as fact.”
And just for fun, one of the “cities” on the outskirts of (US) Philadelphia is named “King of Prussia”, after an inn that used to be there.
German sources tell similar stories. An article from Die Zeit about the German Philadelphia (and also nearby Boston) also says that the settlements were named after the American cities that the inhabitants wanted to but were unable to emigrate to (but doesn’t mention Frederick in particular as having prevented the emigration). Given that you’ve got a Philadelphia and a Boston right next to each other, I think it’s reasonable to accept that there is a legitimate connection to the American counterparts.
Yes, Toledo, Ohio has a “Toledo Spain Plaza.”
I compiled a list of them for wikipedia: US places. I also compile the same list for Canada, but it got deleted for reasons I don’t entirely understand (but I suspect politics). If anyone feels like getting it undeleted, feel free.
Yes, it could be named after someone in the Penn family. After all, that’s how the US state got its name.
Wikipedia lists no less than 8 California’s in various parts of Britain. I’ve never looked into how they got their names.
Wikipedia lists three New York’s in Britain. I always assumed they were named after York, but apparently one was not.
There were actually three Philadelphia’s in the classic world. The other two, which includes the one mentioned in the Bible, were in Anatolia.
There’s a former coal mining village in central Scotland called California. No one seems sure of the reason, but the name seems to date from the time of the California Gold Rush.
Similarly a district of Ipswich has the same name, and for the same reason:
There is a village near where a grew up in Berkshire England called California. According to Wikipedia it got its name from an old brickworks, but surely the name must of at least indirectly come from the American state.
That’s the only area I can think of that I know which is named after a place in the US in South East England. I know Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Kent and London well enough to know most of the obscure place names. Obscure place names in England can be pretty ridiculous, but they’re usually ancient in origin.
According to the German Wikipedia, that’s one of four Texases (Texes?) in Germany. Two of these have their own Wikipedia articles; one says the place is definitely named after the American Texas, and the other says that it’s uncertain but probable that it’s named after the American Texas.
Were they? All the ones I can think of in the UK were based on existing place names. They’re nearly always named after previous settlements in the area, often names that had existed since before the second millennium - Telford was named after a person, though, so there might be other exceptions. There could be some outside the UK, of course. Though “getting city rights” sounds like a very American concept.
Which places are you thinking of?
It’s a good question, given how long the US has been established, but I guess all the places that could be settled and named in Europe were already settled by even a small population, and they clung on to the name. The only areas that might have got rid of residents wholesale, ignored history and imposed new names would have been in the former Soviet bloc.
I think the name “California” has been around longer than the 31st American state. It was the mythical name of a mythical island populated by Amazon-like female warriors. So, as with Philadelphia, non-American places named California may be named directly from earlier sources (as the state of California apparently was).
The British equivalent to “getting city rights” is “getting city status”, which is performed by means of a royal charter or letters patent, i.e., a document issued by the monarch. Of course, under British constitutional conventions, the monarch would only issue such a document on the advice of cabinet ministers (the Home Secretary, in this case), so city status is effectively granted by the government. My understanding is that city status to a settlement that previously was a town is honorific in the UK; it does not give that place additional rights of self-administration compared to the previous town status, other than the right to style itself as a “city”. Quite generally, I think it’s fair to say that the system of local governance in the UK is a complete mess because it gets periodically reformed.
City status doesn’t confer any actual rights, though, and it’s only for long-established settlements - what, five of them this century? Less? It’s not like the way we change municipal boundaries to make a unitary authoritary or whatever.
And there’s no renaming of the place except that Slough, bizarrely, thought that Slough-Upon-Thames would sound more classy rather than like a description of the way the water looks at a sewage outlet.
Here in Melbourne Australia we have a suburb called Brooklyn which I believe is named after the New York borough.
We also have a suburb called Dallas but that’s named after Dallas Brooks who was neither a place nor an American.