It should be noted that descriptive place names are extremely common in the US. The only category more common is those named after people. Those named after another town are a distant third.
Just looking at a map one sees Anchorage AK, Los Alamos NM (the cottonwoods), Little Rock AR, Poplar Bluff MO, Rapid City SD, Eau Claire WI, Grand Rapids MI, and many, many more.
Yes, but the idea, as stated several times upthread, is that the name should refer to things that are/were there.
So, Finger Lakes is descriptive, but it doesn’t refer to actual fingers.
White Settlement, Texas.
The city got its name because it was the lone settlement of White settlers amid several Native American villages in the Fort Worth area in the Texas Republic territory in the 1840s.
How about Red Stick (Baton Rouge) Louisiana describing a bloodiest cypress pole.
The Native American name for Long Island was “Paumanok,” which meant “fish-shaped.” If you look at Long Island on a map, it does look a little like a fish, with the North and South Forks as the tail.
My home town, Silver Spring, MD., was named after a spring that had mica glittering at the bottom of it.
The vast majority of descriptive names refer to things that are/were at that site. Finger Lakes-type exceptions are fairly rare.
Negro Bar, California was a mining camp founded by black prospectors during the Gold Rush. It now lends its name, somewhat controversially, to a section of a state park that now exists on the site.
Placerville, California was named for the placer mining that took place there. Although historically it was known as Hangtown due to some hangings that took place there in 1849. The town’s seal features a hangman’s noose, another symbol that’s become controversial in recent years.
Long Island, NY.
Criminy, but I almost moved there over 30 years ago. I was living in Albuquerque at the time, freshly returned from my first stint in Thailand. My girlfriend lived in White Settlement, which is a suburb of Fort Worth, and wanted me to move there. I almost did it but in the end just could not make myself do it.
Down in the Indiana Dunes is Mount Baldy.
That doesn’t make sense, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Welcome to the thread, by the way. I hope you make a meaningful contribution.
Then let me give you an example or two.
Early explorers to the south shore of Lake Erie noted the presence of bison in that area. While apparently no one recorded it, it’s fairly certain that the Buffalo River and its tributary Buffalo Creek got their names from those animals. Later on, a town was founded along Buffalo Creek and took its name from that stream. Hence, Buffalo NY.
This pattern of naming land forms after animals found in that area was repeated over and over again across the country. It wasn’t always just a prevalence of the animal, sometimes there was an unusual encounter between an explorer and a specific animal. Either way, we have a plethora of rivers, creeks, lakes, hills, mountains, ridges, bluffs, cliffs, falls, etc. named after wolves, elk, beaver, otter, deer, moose, cougar, etc. And sometimes towns take their name from those features, as in the case of Buffalo.
Similarly with plants. There are numerous land forms named for those, especially trees, but also flowers, bushes, etc. But also just a grove of some kind of tree where a town was founded gives the town its name. Hence various tree names like cedar, oak, maple attached to Grove as town names. Or even without the “Grove”; Catalpa MO and Catalpa NE were named that way, for example.
While these kinds of names are very common, they aren’t the only descriptive names out there. Anchorage AK was a good place to anchor ships, for example. There are others, as the submissions to this thread illustrate. But as I said earlier, among town names, descriptive names are second most common only to places named after people.
When Lapel, IN was named, the map of the little town looked like the lapel on a man’s coat. The town’s much bigger now, and the map doesn’t look like that any more. Lapel is about 15 miles from here.
Thank you, dtilque, for that meaningful and considerate post. I didn’t understand your earlier reference to “that site” because I didn’t realize you were referring to the Finger Lakes region.
Yeah, I reckon you’re right.
Just thought of another: Galena, Illinois, named for the mineral in the ore that formed the basis for the region’s early mining economy.
“Bangkok” loosely translated means “Place of Olive Groves.” Apparently there were some around way back when. That’s just the English-language name though. Thais call it Krung Thep, which is “City of Angels” (or Los Angeles), but considering the road death toll, that might be descriptive too.
Blackpool, England, is so named because the sea in the inlet there is quite deep and looks like a black pool.
More interestingly, on the other side of the sea and only slightly further south Dublin has exactly the same meaning.
One of my favourites is Mucking, in Essex, near London. Although the name is older and has a different route, Mucking was the site of one of the biggest landfills in Europe, and also major sewage works that dealt with London waste. The name was very fitting: the place literally stank and still isn’t that nice.
Similarly, Mudchute in London is named for a literal mud chute. It’s quite pleasant these days though.
From post 31ish upthread:
Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington is known in the Lushootseed language of the local Native tribes as Tahoma (which lends its name to the nearby city of Tacoma). Lushootseed has no living native speakers, so what exactly Tahoma means depends on which linguist you ask - it’s either “Mother of Waters”, “Snow-Covered Mountain” or “Larger than Koma Kulshan (i.e. the nearby Mt. Baker)”, and all three names are certainly descriptive. It’s the source of several major rivers, it’s covered in snow year-round although it was looking pretty bare after this summer’s heatwave, and it’s definitely larger than Mt. Baker.
Orange County, California was named for the citrus fruit was grown there before the area got consumed by suburban sprawl.