In the US, when two incorporated cities merge, there seems to be three ways the resulting combined city is named.
Most common by far is that the merged city keeps the name of one of the two predecessors. One of the cities is usually significantly larger than the other and its name is virtually always the winner. I estimate this happens in about 80 to 90 % of all mergers.
The two names are combined into one name. Usually they are hyphenated, but not always. So far I’ve found only eight instances of this type (the year in parens is when they merged):
[ul]
[li]Batesburg-Leesville SC (1993)[/li][li]Dover-Foxcroft ME (1922)[/li][li]Fleming-Neon KY (1978)[/li][li]Milton-Freewater OR (1951)[/li][li]Norwood Young America MN (1997)[/li][li]Sedro-Woolley WA (1898)[/li][li]Soddy-Daisy TN (1969)[/li][li]Winston-Salem NC (1913)[/li][/ul]
There’s probably a fair number of others around; I’ve mostly just gotten the larger ones.
Also note that just because a name is hyphenated doesn’t mean it’s the result of a merger. Wilkes-Barre PA, for example, is not the result of a merger. It’s always been named that (except for losing the accent mark on the final letter).
The rarest type appears to be when the new city gets a completely new name, unrelated to any of the predecessors. I’ve only found two examples so far: Lincoln City OR and Park Hills MO. Both are the result of merging more than two cities at once. Hyphenating 4 or 5 names together would obviously produce too big a mouthful, so they were essentially forced to come up with new names.
My question is: Does anyone know of any more examples of type 3? Or even of type 2? Are there any examples that don’t fall into one of these categories?
Please note that I’m interested in US places, although I wouldn’t mind hearing of any unusual examples from other countries. I already know about Budapest and Garnish-Parkinsons… er Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. I also understand that merged villages are fairly common in Germany and that both type 2 and type 3 are fairly common. Furthermore, some places there blend the former names together to create a new name.
Around here there’s Fuquay-Varina, NC. It’s got an interesting story behind it - which I never new before this question came up - involving a Civil War romance sparked by war-time letters to the troops (on the Southern side). The merger took place relatively late - 1963.
Sauk Prairie Wisconsin formed by the merger of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac. Both were one of the earliest settled cities in Wisconsin, and each one was settled by a different nationality. They fought against the each other for years.
August Derleth used the name Sac Prairie in some of his books, having merged the two towns to write about them. August Derleth is a famous writer from Sauk City you need to read if you have no idea who he is. I see the home page lists the two separate cities for achievements even though they are merged. I guess they are more in a transitional limbo.
“In 1968, four small beach towns - Windy Hill Beach - Crescent Beach - Ocean Drive Beach and Cherry Grove Beach… joined forces to form the City of North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina”. (A fifth town, Atlantic Beach, remains independent from the rest).
In the year 1970-71, I moved into an apartment in the Swiss town of Marly-le-Petit in the canton of Fribourg (aka Freiburg in German). A km or so down the road, was the town of Marly-le-Grand. Sometime during the spring of '71, they merged to produce the town of–surprise–Marly. I don’t know where the original names came from but there is a French town called Marly-le-Roi.
Hull, Gatineau, Aylmer, and a number of other municipalities were merged to create the city of Gatineau. Hull was the largest of these cities, and the most famous, as it’s immediately across the river from Ottawa (it was commonplace to speak of “Ottawa-Hull”). However, the name Gatineau designated the region in general.
Chicoutimi, Jonquière, La Baie and several other municipalities were merged to form the city of Saguenay. Similarly, the region had been known as the Saguenay, after the Saguenay River. So they didn’t just make up a name, but they chose one that hadn’t been that of any of the previous municipalities.
In 1965, the towns of Auteuil, Chomedey, Duvernay, Fabreville,Laval-des-Rapides, Laval-Ouest, Laval-sur-le-Lac, Les Îles-Laval, Pont-Viau, Saint-François, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Sainte-Dorothée, Sainte-Rose, and Vimont were merged into the city of Laval. Again, a name in common use in the area (Île Jésus, which makes up the territory of the new city, had belonged to Monseigneur de Laval), but not the name of any of the earlier municipalities.
In Utah the unincorporated communities of Hunter and Granger (suburbs of Salt Lake City) decided to merge in 1980, and adopted the name of West Valley City. Apparently they thought that this sounded better than either Grunter or Hunger.
Actually, Gatineau was the largest of the incorporated cities, with a population of more than 100,000 (compared with 66,246 for Hull). This, of course, was probably the result of the previous municipal amalgamations that had created Gatineau during the 70s, and that had given the city a large potential for growth. Hull, on the other hand, was much more limited in its potential expansion.
It is true that Hull was more well-known, and was arguably the “central” city of the region, although I would say that Ottawa fits this role better, despite being in another province.
Chesapeake City, Virginia, was formed from the merger of the city of South Norfolk and the county of Norfolk.
Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, is a special case. It was the original name of the place, before it split into Old Fort Mitchell and South Fort Mitchell. When they were reunited, it was under the original name.
A Canadian example: Thunder Bay, Ontario, was formed from Fort William, Port Arthur, and a couple of smaller towns, none of which was called Thunder Bay.
When the Pennsylvania boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk merged, the new community took the name Jim Thorpe both to honor the great athlete who had died in 1953 and to try to attract attention from people who might thus be inspired to learn about the area’s potential appeal as a tourist destination.