I’ll make sure to fix the spelling before I submit the page.
Almeria, Nebraska is named after the wife of the town founder, according to Wikipedia.
Almeria, Alabama has no page in the English Wiki, but does in the Spanish one (link). I’ve never studied Spanish but can sometimes get the gist of it when written. If I understand correctly, it says there’s no direct connection between the town’s name and Almería in Spain.
Well, I submitted the page for review, but it may take a week or so before that happens. In the meantime, I can still make additions/deletions to the page, and everyone can still see it, but I can’t change it to move on to the next article.
I went through the list of Napoleanic battles and found there are places named for the battles of Austerlitz and Arcole. Well, also Trafalgar, but that’s not a city. We’ll save it for the region list. There’s also a Lepanto AR which is named for an even earlier battle/city in Greece.
My sandbox page has been moved to the Drafts section, but there’s a link to it at the sandbox page. Which means my sandbox is tied up for now and I can’t start on the region page.
In the meantime, I can still add stuff to the Draft version. I’ve already added Otranto Italy/Iowa (needs confirmation) and will be adding Leibenthal and Schoenchen KS. These last two are Volga German settlements named for villages near Odessa Ukraine. Also Iconium, IA.
Philippi, the ancient city in Greece, was the namesake of Philippi WV.
NM
I looked into that, and it turns out that it’s named for someone named Philip. Someone recent, not Alexander’s father. I was very disappointed.
I looked into these a bit futher and found I was mistaken about some things. Mostly that the originals were near Odessa rather than in Russia. The confusion came from there being a different group of Russian Germans near Odessa and one of their villages was also named Leibenthal. I ended up finding no less than 5 of these Volga German villages in the same part of Kansas, each named for a village in the Old Country. Or in one case, a town that’s been renamed after Karl Marx (it formerly was named after Catherine the Great).
Alas, the name of Otranto, IA seems to be borrowed from Horace Walpole’s wildly popular pioneering gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, (1764), not directly from the geographic location in Italy.
US placenames attest to the popularity of gothic and other romantic fiction among 19th-century Americans. Besides Otranto, IA there are, for example, Udolpho, MN (from Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho), Glenarvon, KY (from Lady Caroline Lamb’s eponymous novel), and Waverly, IA (after Scott’s Waverley novels).
Thanks for that.
So it goes into a different list. I have another list (which I am not soliciting additions for, but will take anyway) of towns named for fiction: characters, fictional places, or book titles. You just provided about 3 that I didn’t have. Others already on it are Ben Hur (several in various states), Ivanhoe (several in various states and also Canada and Australia), and Tarzana CA. Someone gave me Narnia MD in the other thread. There’s also a creek in Kentucky named for Lorbrulgrud, the capital of Brobdingnag. That’s not the name of the creek; they spelled it somewhat different.
Try my nice Eidsvold Township, MN, “named for Ejdsvold (Eidsvoll), Akershus, Norway, whence many of its early settlers came”.
Hranice, TX was settled by Czech and Moravian immigrants who named it for the Moravian town.
Thanks for the additions. The first one looks good, but it says on that Texas Historical Assn page you link to
I know, but judging from the pictures on the more detailed history at this site, plus the general flatness of East Texas, I have a hard time believing that the place was named just for its “height” by a bunch of Moravian settlers with no reference to the well-known town of Hranice in Moravia.
By the way, the book in that last link has a number of other Czech settlements in the US, including Novohrad, TX.
Unless my searching skills have failed me, somehow this thread has gotten this far without Birmingham, Alabama being mentioned. Named for Birmingham, England. There are other Birminghams, but the one in Alabama is fairly notable.
While I didn’t have it at the beginning of the thread, sometime in the middle I managed to get a list up on the net. It had Birmingham AL from the beginning. And I did say before that that I already had all the big cities, and Birmingham qualifies as one of those. Here’s where that list currently is, although that link will change some time in the future. At the current rate they’re evaluating proposed pages, it’ll be there for at least another week, probably longer. I can change it while it’s waiting to get to the head of the queue, so more additions are appreciated.
OK, you’ve convinced me, Hranice TX was named after the one in Moravia. The problem is that I can’t point to a reference that outright says so. And Wikipedia is pretty anal about that sort of thing, you know, the old “citation needed” thing.
I notice that most of the text about the town in the various sites you’ve given is repetitive, which means it was likely copied, either verbatim or with minor paraphase, from a single source. Probably that old book. And that source has an etymology for Hranice in the Old Country applied to the one in the New Country, so any other source about it is not going to say anything different. I’m not sure what to do about this.
In that particular case, the town in Texas is gone and I can’t find any evidence for one in Czechia. Possibly that place was named for the Novohrad Mountains. Or maybe there was a village at one time that’s also since disappeared.
But there’s others: Melnik WI, Vodnany SD, Bila Hora TX, Vsetin TX, Loucky NE and maybe others. I have to go now, so I’ll look into it more later.
OK, got the additions made, except for Hranice (have to think about that one, but I have sort of an idea). Also it turned out that Bila Hora was not named after a town, but then I found Bruno NE which was named for Brno. That’s a big one, since I believe it’s the largest city in Moravia.
Figured out what to do about Hranice and it’s now been added. After looking at the links more closely, I found that the book did not mention that translation of the name. And as best I can tell, the translation “high point” is wrong. It seems it actually means “border”. So I just ignored the other two sites and cited the book.
The only issue now is which Hranice in Czechia it’s named after. There are three, although one is fairly small and is probably not it. I chose the larger of the other two, which is in Moravia.
I came across these in a different search and found out what Nijmegen and Cherbourg NC actually are: neighborhoods of privatized military housing. There’s about a dozen of them at Fort Bragg, almost all of which are named after the locations of famous military battles: Ardennes, Normandy, Bougainville, Ste Mere Eglise, Bastogne etc.
There are not one but two unincorporated areas in Maryland named “Mexico” (there used to be three!), and one named “New Mexico.”
Confirmation fairy sez:
Fuller and Beeson’s Michigan History, vol. 51, corroborates the source of the Michigan placename “Pori” as the Finnish city of that name.
It also attributes Liminga, MI to Finnish Liminka, and Wasas, MI to Finnish Wasa/Vasa/Vaasa.
Thank you, Kinstu. We’re definitely deficient on Finnish places. considering how many Finns emigrated here. I found a book that says there was a Helsing, WA at some point, named for Helsingfors (Swedish name for Helsinki) but I can’t find any evidence it still exists. However, the same book gave me Tilsit, WA, which was named for Tbilisi, Georgia (the country) and Kenmore WA, named for a place in Ontario.
There’s going to be some significant changes to the page. All the data will still be there, but I got someone to review the page and he suggested a few changes, such as grouping England, Scotland, etc under the UK. But the biggest, at least as far as work goes, is that he says Wikipedia will want all these “named for” relationships cited with something other than another Wikipage. So I’m putting as much of that in as I can (lots and lots of Gannet cites). You don’t have to worry about that, though; all your additions are cited.
Anyway, that’s how I got the Washington cites above; the local library has an etymology book for that state, and I happen to run across them when looking up others we already have.
So thanks for the additions and citations.