Help with place name origins

[Kimstu]

Gaza, NH, with an interesting anecdote about its naming by the postmaster’s wife pointing blindfold at an open Bible.

[Kimstu]

Inconclusive data about the naming of Culloden, WV (although I still bet it was for the Battle of Culloden).

I regretfully withdraw my suggestion of Bantam, CT for Banten in Indonesia, since it seems to have been a Native American place name subsequently replaced by “Litchfield”.

Apparently there is also a defunct Patna, NV, even more obscure than Patna, VA.

[dtilque]

According to GNIS, there’s a populated place named Nijmegen in NC. This page says it’s a neighborhood of Fayetteville NC near Fort Bragg. The original Nijmegen is in Netherlands.

On thinking it over, I expect that’s a WWII-influenced naming. Fort Bragg is the HQ of the 82nd Airborne which was involved in Operation Market Garden. A bridge at Nijmegen was one of the objectives of that operation.

[Kimstu]

@dtilque

On thinking it over, I expect that’s a WWII-influenced naming. Fort Bragg is the HQ of the 82nd Airborne which was involved in Operation Market Garden. A bridge at Nijmegen was one of the objectives of that operation.

And given that Nijmegen NC seems to be part of an area called Nijmegen-Cherbourg, and Cherbourg was another important battle involving the 82nd Airborne, I bet you’re right.

[Huvudtvatt]

@dtilque

It certainly looks like Falun is good.

Confirmed. The township and post office of Falun was organised in 1871. Local postmaster Erik Fors named it after the capital of his home province of Dalarna.
source: Amerikanska ortnamn af svenskt ursprung (1915)

[Kimstu]

@Huvudtvatt

source: Amerikanska ortnamn af svenskt ursprung (1915)

Wow, that is pretty cool. It hadn’t occurred to me that foreign-language sources might discuss adoption of their place names in America.

But after seeing your cite I googled around and came upon the Nederlands in de Verenigde Staten page on Dutch Wikipedia, and boy howdy do I have some more Nieuw-Nederland goodness now!

I present for your list-enhancing pleasure:

Noordeloos, MI

Zutphen, MI

Charleroi, PA (from Charleroi in Belgium)

Michigan also has a Vriesland, a Zeeland, an Overisel and a Drenthe, but since those are named after Dutch provinces rather than cities I’m not proposing them. The same seems to hold for Graafschap, MI, named after the area around (Dutch) Zutphen.

[dtilque]

Great job Kimstu. I’m surprised that page didn’t have Nederland, Colorado.

I did discover a Little Trieste, Utah in GNIS. And that name Charleroi looked familiar. After looking at the page, I realize that I’d seen it while compiling my list, but misread it and thought the US town was named for the king.

[dtilque]

I’ve been thinking that after I get done with this project I should do the same for regions. Everyone’s been suggesting them, so I may as well make use of them. Also, others will be adding them to the wikipage I’m making, so there should be a complementary page for them. I’d do it now, but I only have one wiki sandbox.

ETA: unless someone else want to do it.

[dtilque]

Just added these:

Laurium, ancient Greece
Niederfrohna, Germany
Paitzdorf, Germany
Seelitz, Germany
Travnik, Slovenia
Wels, Austria
Wittenberg, Germany

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@bibliophage

Several states have towns called Pekin, an old transliteration of Beijing. Nikep, Maryland, is Pekin spelled backwards, perhaps so named because it was thought to be “opposite Pekin.”

Canton, Ohio, is named for Guangzhou and not for the English common noun.

I’ve hear the same story about Canton being “opposite” the Chinese city.

Or maybe that was Canton, IL.

[Kimstu]

Got room for Balbec, IN, apparently named for Baalbek in Lebanon?

[dtilque]

@Kimstu

Got room for Balbec, IN, apparently named for Baalbek in Lebanon?

Excellent! A new country. Well, new because I put Tyre and Sidon in the Ancient World section.

I made some other progress: text at the top of the page, various additions like Karlsruhe, Germany/ND, found a Wiki page on Dutch placenames and found several there. That page is misnamed, because it has places from all over the world outside the Netherlands, not just the US

Ran across a place named Brevik, MN which is almost certainly named after either Brevik. Norway or Brevik, Sweden. But which one?

Still have to put in the references and links to other pages and then I can submit it for addition. we can always add more places after that’s done, but it’ll let me get started on the region page.

[Rick_Kitchen]

Cities named for regions, or regions named for regions as well?

[dtilque]

@Rick_Kitchen

Cities named for regions, or regions named for regions as well?

Probably both. I haven’t seen very many regions named for cities that I don’t already have, but things are probably different for regions. I do include townships and New England Towns, which are small, often rural, regions. And their equivalents (often called municipalities) in other countries.

I’m making a preliminary list as I run across them, and I’ll start a thread on it once I have the sandbox initiated with it. Of course, if you want to start the page instead, don’t let me stop you. I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I get started, but not in the next few days, for sure.

Note that there’s already a very long list of places named for people already in Wikipedia, which is a reason not to add them to my lists. I can just point people there.

[Kimstu]

@dtilque

Ran across a place named Brevik, MN which is almost certainly named after either Brevik. Norway or Brevik, Sweden. But which one?

I regretfully question whether it was directly named after a place at all, rather than an eponymous person. Norwegian immigrants named Brevik seem to have been thick on the ground in Cass County, MN, in its early years of settlement (1920 superintendent of education report referencing two teachers surnamed Brevik). This obituary mentions that the decedent, born in 1925, “was born in a log cabin in the town of Brevik MN, founded by his grandfather Olav Brevik”.

So while the family name seems to have certainly come from the Norwegian Brevik, ISTM likely that the town was named after one of those members of the Brevik family rather than directly for the Norwegian placename.

[dtilque]

OK, so begone Brevik! I also decided to remove Gibratar, thinking it would go better in the region list.

Made other additions, including biblical places. The page is getting close to submission quality. The only thing I know of to add right now is a footnote about Nijmegen and Cherbourg, since there’s no reference for them.

Well, also I’m not sure I should have included all the biblical places, since for some their location is not known. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

[dtilque]

I ran across a Nankin OH and am thinking it could be named for Nanjing. I only have a few Chinese cities, so it would be good to get another. Couldn’t find anything through Google, so does anyone have an idea about this?

[Kimstu]

History of Ashland County, Ohio is not much help:

Nankin is in Orange township, was laid out by Amos Norris and John Chilcote, April 22, 1828. It is located on section 28 on a branch of Mohican creek in the midst of splendid farming lands. It was for many years a flourishing village but its nearness to the county seat has somewhat checked its growth. The New York, Pennsylvania & Ohio Railway passes near the village and has a small station and telegraph office.

The town was formerly called Orange but was changed to Nankin a few years since.

Michigan had a brief flurry of Chinese-inspired place-names around the same time:

In 1829, it was proposed that Bucklin Township be divided into Lima and Richland. Due to name conflicts under territorial law prohibiting duplication of post office names, the bill was amended; Lima was renamed Nankin Township, after the Chinese city Nanking, and Richland was renamed Pekin Township, after Peking.

In 1833 Pekin was renamed Redford Township, and its southern portion was subsequently set off as Dearborn Township. In 1834 Plymouth Township’s southern portion became Canton Township, named after Canton, Imperial China.

In 1835, Livonia Township (now the city of Livonia) was split off from Nankin. There was a post office called East Nankin beginning in 1857.

Since significant levels of US-China trade and Chinese immigration into the US both got going in the early 19th century, I would consider it almost certain that the Nankin, OH placename is likewise from Nanking in China.

[Kimstu]

By the way, the extinct or nearly-extinct Pretoria, GA appears to have been named for the South African city.

[Kimstu]

And while I think of it, the ghost town of Aden, IL (renamed from “Lower Hills” in 1894) seems likely to be from Aden in Yemen.

There’s also nearby Karnak, IL, from Karnak in Egypt. Fascinating piece about the Egypt associations in Southern Illinois, which likewise explains your Dongola, IL:

One of the first persons to associate Southern Illinois with Egypt was John Badgley, a Baptist missionary to the French and Indian villages in the American Bottoms. […]

In 1799, during his travels among the French settlements, he went up on top of the bluffs in the area of what’s now Edwardsville and dubbed the fertile highlands and bottoms the “Land of Goshen.” Being a preacher, he knew that the Bible referred to Goshen as the best land of ancient Egypt. It was the land the pharaoh gave to Joseph’s family after they came to Egypt.

That Bagdley is the one is credited with the name “Goshen” is not disputed. Neither is the Biblical reference to Egypt. So why did he give the area the Egyptian name? If the land was so good, why not call it Canaan, the land the Bible describes as a land of milk and honey?

Regrettably, Badgley didn’t give us the answer, but the answer may be visible even today. As you stand on top of the bluffs above the American Bottoms you see a grand river valley that even in 1799, settlers knew contained the longest river on the continent, if not the world. There are only two rivers longer than the combined Missouri-Mississippi Rivers, and those are the Amazon and the Nile.

Baptist preachers on the frontier probably did not know much if anything about the Amazon, but the Nile was well known to European Civilization. Thus the Mississippi itself probably led to the first reference to Egypt. […]

Along the rivers one could see various mounds, in the hills, ancient stone forts, and up the Mississippi itself, the largest mounds of them all near Cahokia.

During the past two centuries many of the mounds have disappeared, but when settlers first came there were mounds at Shawneetown, the mouth of the Saline River and the Black Bottoms east of Brookport now known as the Kinkaid Mounds. Appropriately, there were mounds at Mound City and Mounds as well.

Archeologists have found the ruins of 11 ancient stone forts in the Shawnee Hills, the largest and best known is the one three miles east of Stonefort. Centuries-old Spanish maps show an ancient fort on the Salinas (now Saline) River. Early French maps also mark the ruins of an ancient fort at Cairo.

So the Mississippi Valley not only served as a reminder to the Nile, the local mounds gave a faint physical resemblance to the pyramids of Egypt. The mounds and ruins of stone forts gave evidence of an ancient culture that had been more advanced than the Indian cultures that inhabited the state at the end of the 18th Century.

If Goshen was the first Egyptian name, how did the others come about? The first to develop was Cairo, although it’s not known whether the city of Cairo at the confluence at the southern end of the state was first, or a place known as Mount Cairo in Hardin County. […]

Before Cairo got off the ground, another Egyptian city sprang to life in the early Alexander County seat of Thebes. Another attempt, this time a failure, was the platted town of Alexandria which would have been on the Mississippi River between Thebes and Cairo. Dongola was an ancient city on the upper Nile in what’s now Sudan. The fifth truly Egyptian name was Karnak which was created early this century as a lumber town.

Then there are the names that use Egypt itself. Egyptian Mills was a timber town in Hamilton County that faded, but those type of names continue to be used even to the present. The Lake of Egypt south of Marion was developed in the early 1960s. The Crab Orchard & Egyptian Railroad was developed in the 1970s to serve Marion.