Misleading Location Names

One that was found on these boards :

Squaw Valley, CA is a little east of Fresno and over a hundred miles south of Lake Tahoe.
The resort that hosted the Olympics (Squaw Valley) is located in a town now called Olympic Valley.
Mission San Jose is located in Fremont, CA, several miles north of San Jose. Mission Santa Clara is much closer, almost on the border with San Jose.

The Mission San Francisco de Asís goes by the name of Mission Dolores, though the city kept its name. There is a San Francisco - Mission San Francisco de Solano is in Sonoma, (which is not in Solano County).
There’s a section of Interstate 580 West that is also 80 East for several miles. It runs north.

Why is Upper Sandusky, OH south of Sandusky, OH ?

Glastonbury takes place in Pilton.

The City of Delaware is in Delaware, but that second Delaware is in Ohio. (It’s Delaware County, Ohio, with the county seat also called Delaware.)

Harvard College is not in Harvard, Massachusetts. Harvard Observatory, however, is.

In Tokyo, Arakawa Ward is named after the Arakawa River, but does not border it at any point (it used to, actually, but some determined public works projects changed that).

It was once explained to me that in Indiana,

  • North Bend is South
  • South Bend is North
  • French Lick is not what you think it is

Elevation?

There are dozens of such pairs in Ohio. In fact, the general rule is that if there is a city and county of the name name, then the city is in some other county.

Yes, Upper Sandusky is upstream of Sandusky, on the Sandusky River. (And there’s also a Sandusky County on that river, in between the two).

The U.S. Navy’s Naval Submarine Base New London is not in New London, Connecticut. It is on the other side of the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut.

Bradley International Airport is generally listed as being in Hartford, Connecticut, but is actually located 15 miles to the north in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. (To make things even more confusing, the airport’s location is sometimes listed as “Hartford/Springfield,” though this is probably closer to reality, since the airport does serve both cities and is located almost exactly midway between the two.)

Fairview, Iowa…it is not.

128 was the original beltway around Boston, built in the 1950’s and widened several times since then. It still runs all by itself from the I-95 in Peabody all the way up to Gloucester. I can’t find its southern end on my Rand McNally atlas. The last “128” there shows just southeast of US 1 in Dedham. It used to run over to Braintree.

Route I-95 got put onto circumferential 128 after the folks in Milton killed the extention of the 95 freeway northward from Dedham into Boston through the Fowl Meadow area. It would have gone up the route taken by the MBTA Orange Line. The Commonwealth gave up a lot of its federal highway funding so that it could get the transit funds to expand the MBTA. Later NC Senator Terry Sanford overrode Reagan’s veto of the highway funding bill that got the Big Dig started.

This post is an absolute opus that encompasses the collective consciousness, politics, highway construction, and history of Boston. I am in awe that you know so much about this (what do you do?) but it is still hilarious to read as a dysfunctional story about how things ended up the way that they are. I swear that if you expanded this story as a segue into the history of the Big Dig, you would have a popular book.

But it’s not complete! He forgot to explain how many of the numbered routes in the Bay State are actually paved over old cattle trails. So, while most places choose to place their roadbeds in such a way to minimize hazards, or to follow the lay of the land, many Bay State roads have, at their base, nothing more complicated than the group mind of herds of cattle on their way to market, with sharp turns being taken to avoid the old tree that used to scare their forebears years ago.

Nah, Hamilton “College” is just a school in Hamilton. :smiley:

And West Chester, not Chester, is the one in Chester County.

Also, there’s a Wyoming, PA, near Wilkes-Barre, in the Wyoming Valley. The state of Wyoming was named after the valley.

Closer to Lancaster, actually. The big joke is that you have to go through Intercourse to get from Blue Ball to Paradise.

Out back of Ipswich, there are two villiages on the highway to Toowoomba - Plainlands and Forest Hill.

Forest Hill is a low, flat area of grasslands which stretches for miles around the northern side of the highway while and Plainlands, on the oter side of the highway is hilly and heavily wooded.

The guy who drew up the original maps of the district got the names mixed up back in the 1860’s and no one ever corrected the error!

mm

Upper Dublin, PA has no corresponding Lower Dublin, which was long since absorbed into Philly. Of course, regular old Dublin PA, in Bucks County is north of Upper Dublin.

Lebanon, Damascus, Mount Vernon, Pheonix, Oakland, and Waterloo are all in Oregon.

And Moscow is in Idaho