I was wondering what the most common city name is. Is there a town/city name that exists in all 50 states (or at least a high percentage of them)?
CandyMan
This was already covered here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=23409
The most common place name is probably Greenville. It has been confirmed to be the place of a town, city, or village (i.e. dot on a map) in something like 39 states. Using GNIS (the geographic names information service) people have found that there is a Riverside in 46 states and a Centerville in 45 states, though GNIS is notoriously liberal in defining “place names,” and I doubt if one could find confimation on a few of these.
So, depending on what your source is, the three most common place names in the U.S. are Greenville, Riverside, and Centerville. (please note that spelling variations count, thus Greeneville or Greaneville for Greenville, or Centreville for Centerville count in this count.)
According to a (several year old) Rand McNally database, “Fairview” is the most common place name in North America, topping the list with 92 locations. This does not include spelling variations. I will have to do more research to limit it to places in the US only, however.
I think towns named after presidents are fairly common too: Washington, Lincoln, Jackson, Adams.
My WAG is that Springfield (ala the Simpsons) must be pretty high on the list of common city names…
Among the larger cities (over 10,000 people) Springfield is largest (with 8). Including smaller towns (above 1,000 people), Clinton elbows its way to the front (with 23). But when you count all places, neither of these names is the top dog.
I was skeptical of some of the answers posted here so I decided to figure it out myself. I simply downloaded the master city names/zip codes file from the US Postal Service and analyzed it in MS Access to see how many states each city name appears in. This is interesting because the results support some of the earlier posts while adding some new additions. I didn’t hear anyone mention poor Franklin but it appears to be the real champ.
Here were my Top 10 most common city/town names in the US.
City CountOfCity
Franklin 27
Clinton 26
Madison 26
Washington 25
Greenville 24
Chester 24
Salem 24
Springfield 24
Marion 24
Georgetown 22
How many city names are duplicated within one state? Is that even allowed? That might explain some of the variations in stats.
No duplicates are allowed per state. I ruled this out in my queries. The results simply show how many states that city name appears in (not how many times that name occurs in the US in total). I did not take population or spelling variations into account but after digging fairly deep, I believe that the results are a valid answer to the original question.
BTW, if you combine Centerville (17 states) and Centreville (8 states), it would make this list but only in a tie for fourth.
Franklin still wins:
City State
Franklin AL
Franklin AR
Franklin GA
Franklin ID
Franklin IL
Franklin IN
Franklin KS
Franklin KY
Franklin LA
Franklin MA
Franklin ME
Franklin MI
Franklin MN
Franklin MO
Franklin NC
Franklin NE
Franklin NH
Franklin NJ
Franklin NY
Franklin OH
Franklin PA
Franklin TN
Franklin TX
Franklin VA
Franklin VT
Franklin WI
Franklin WV
There are actually two questions we are discussing here:
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What is the most common placename in the US?
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What placename occurs in the most states.
The answers to these are not the same. Further, the answers for them may vary depending on the reference you use. It will also depend on what spelling variants you allow.
The larger the reference used, the more places will be listed that you might not consider to be actual “places”. But where do you draw the line? Is a locality with a church, a store and a few houses not a place while one with a church, two stores and a few more houses OK? How about with just a store and houses? Or do they have to have a school or a post office? And even if you could come up with a set of criteria, you can’t go around to them all to verify what places qualify. So you must select a reference you’re comfortable with. Personally, the bigger the reference, the happier I am.
As someone pointed out, the largest database around (GNIS) is far too liberal for them. Another large database, albeit of the deadtree variety, is Rand McNally’s Commercial Atlas and Marketing Guide (RMCA) is also fairly liberal. GNIS has over a million entries, but most are in categories other than populated places. RMCA has something over 100,000 entries.
I’ve done considerable research on answering both these questions in both of these references (someday I’m going to turn it into an article for Word Ways). It turns out that the answer for question 1 is not the same. GNIS has a few more for Midway (253) than for Fairview (249). RMCA goes the other way with 152 for Fairview and 127 for Midway.
Question 2 came out the same for both questions: Riverside and Centerville in that order. Neither Franklin nor Greenville was in the top ten of either reference.
I should note that the only spelling variations I allowed was in spacing. That is, Fair View was considered the same as Fairview, but Centreville was not the same as Centerville. I did count alternate names (which GNIS calls variant names) and virtually every Centreville has an alternate name of Centerville (there’s a reason for this which I won’t go into here). But the various ways Greenville is spelled kept it out of contention.
One final observation. Just because a place is very common does not mean that it is found in lots of states. An extreme example of this is Oak Grove, the name that’s the third most common in both references. There are 120 Oak Groves in RMCA, but they are found in only 26 states. Tennessee alone has 25 Oak Groves.
You seem to have much more experience than this than me Dtilque but the original question as I read it was “What city or town name occurs in the most states?”. I understand that there are many unincorporated areas, nicknames of neighborhoods, or county/parish names that increase the complication of this type of analysis but it seems to me that going by the USPS zip codes limits it to actual incorporated towns and cities. I still stand by my top ten if these are the starting assumptions.
That’s probably what he meant. The way it was phrased was such that the two questions were thought equivalent. One of my points was that that was not the case.
I fear this isn’t the case. There are many unincorporated places that have post offices (I live in one). Not all are rural. There are quite a few well-developed suburbs that for various reasons (often because it will raise the tax rate) are not incorporated, but they do have post offices. And I don’t know of any off-hand, but I’m sure there are incorporated towns without a post office or with a post office whose name is different from that of the town.
I have no problem with that. My main point was that different ways of counting will produce different results. My way of counting is more inclusive, but not everyone will be happy with everything I included.
I suppose the real conclusion here is that there is no simple answer to the question.
Re Franklin: there is a Franklin, CT, which is not on the Post Office list. It is a really small town, so maybe mail addressed there has some other delivery domicile or something, but this may explain why Franklin shows up the most according to the P.O. but not according to other sources. I would guess this probably occurs with a lot of other towns on the P.O. list also.