Interesting! Wiki has it that in the Obispeño language (one of the Chumash Native American languages), the site was named tsɨskikiye, which translates into a “place of much water”.
You can buy t-shirts that say “Indiana, where North Vernon is south, South Bend is north, and French Lick isn’t what you think it is.” It’s named for Lick Creek and the French trappers who settled there. Floyd’s Knobs, IN is where Mr. Floyd’s farm had some hills on it. Summitville, IN contains the highest spot in relatively flat Madison County.
El Estor in Guatemala is so named as it was used as a “store” for booty and supplies by English-speaking pirates in the 18th Century. Of course not so descriptive in the 21st century.
Blowing Rock, North Carolina is named for a rock formation that due to its shape can cause the wind to blow vertically.
There’s also Coalinga, CA. Which is literally just a contraction of Coaling Station A. Though again not super descriptive nowadays as there is no longer a Coaling Station there.
Point Reyes Station, CA got its name because it was the closest train station to Point Reyes.
North River, NY is at the north of the Hudson River, just north of North Creek.
Similarly, Huntington Station, NY.
And there’s the example of State College, PA, home of Pennsylvania State College.
Also College Station, TX, home of Texas A&M.
My favorite: Peculiar, Missouri
https://cityofpeculiar.com/pView.aspx?id=6747&catid=587
Because the all the good Post Office names on the maps were taken! Or so the story goes.
The tiny settlement of Volcano, California, is not actually a volcano. The story goes that the original settlers thought the bowl shaped valley was a volcanic crater (but they were mistaken). So that one is actually an inaccurate description.
OP here. That kind of thing is fine. The name still refers to something that is/was there, even if it’s a mistaken assumption.
My daughter and SIL are vacationing right now. They were in New York’s Finger-lakes region hiking and drinking wine, then Niagara Falls, and are now in Michigan at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore which surely qualifies as descriptive.
The park gets its name from the 400-foot-high Sleeping Bear Dune, a major landmark for early lake travelers and the subject of an Indian legend . A mother bear and her two cubs were swimming from Wisconsin across Lake Michigan to escape a forest fire, the story goes. Nearing the Michigan shore, the cubs lagged behind.
The town of my birth, Belle Fourche, South Dakota; French for “beautiful fork”, named for the confluence of the Belle Fourche River, Redwater River, and Hay Creek.
But the tiny village of Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii is by the Kilauea volcano, which started erupting again suddenly yesterday afternoon.
Portage means “a place where you have to pick up your canoe and carry it around an obstacle in the river”, which is what the early French explorers had to do at Portage, Wisconsin.
The Hudson used to be called the North River (and the Delaware used to be called the South River). Not sure when the names changed, nor why. When the Geo. Washington bridge was first proposed it was to be the North River Bridge. By the time, maybe 50 years later, it was built, it was over the Hudson.
And the fact that I keep misreading the title of this thread as “deceptive place names” makes it all the more fitting.
And adding to the list of descriptive place names, Apple Hill, California is in the Sierra Nevada foothills and is named for its apple orchards. And going apple picking there is a popular fall family activity.
Montreal comes from “Mont Real”, an old French name for Mount Royal, a large hill in the middle of the city.
Blue Island, IL
The north-central section of the city of Blue Island is located at the south end of a glacial moraine that once was an island when the waters from Lake Chicago covered the surrounding area at the former lake’s Glenwood Stage. Early pioneers gave the ridge the name because at a distance it looked like an island set in a trackless prairie sea. The blue color was attributed to atmospheric scattering or to blue flowers growing on the ridge.[79] The Chicago Democrat , February, 1834 described it:
“Nearly south of this town and twelve miles [19 km] distant is Blue Island. This name is particularly appropriate. It is a table of land about six miles [10 km] long and an average of two miles [3.2 km] wide, of an oval form and rising some forty feet [12 m] out of an immense plain which surrounds it on every side. The sides and slopes of this table, as well as the table itself, are covered with a handsome growth of timber, forming a belt surrounding about four or five thousand acres of beautiful table land. In summer, the plain is covered with luxurious herbage. It is uninhabited, and when we visited it, from its stillness, loneliness, and quiet, we pronounced it a vast vegetable solitude. The ridge, when viewed from a distance, appears standing in an azure mist of vapor, hence the appellation ‘Blue Island’.”
Unfortunately, it is just another decaying suburb now, nothing blue or island about it.
I always wondered about Blue Island. Your linked information has reminded me of one I hadn’t thought about in a long time: Lake Superior is so named not because it’s of higher quality but for its more northerly location in relation to the other Great Lakes.