It’s very common for a newly founded town or city to be named after an existing one. In most cases, the new town fades in importance behind the original it borrowed the name from, and people will think, when they hear the name, of the original one. Examples: All the Romes and Athens that you find in various states of the US.
Occasionally, the new city will completely overshadow the original one. An example would be Boston, Lincolnshire, which fades in importance compared to the capital of Massachusetts.
That made me wonder: Are there pairs of namesake cities where both are of roughly equal importance? The best pair I could come up with are the two Birminghams in England and Alabama. Other examples I thought of were New York and York in England, or London and London, Ontario; but in these cases the larger of the two places is of such outstanding importance that it still overshadows the smaller one, although the smaller one is still an important place in its own right.
Possibly Richmond. The Virginia city was named after a town near London where Henry VII built a palace with that name. It’s now part of a borough of London, but I’m not sure how important that borough is.
St Petersburg is perhaps somewhat close to being another. (Did I put enough qualifiers in that sentence?)
A number of English place names are repeated in the USA, and Canada has a bunch of Scottish place names, usually of somewhere small and/or remote. Oh, those homesick Caledonians.
AFAIK, the Mid-West has some Germanic place names. When I try to book flights to Stuttgart or Berlin (in Churmany), the software often throws up US locations of the same name.
Birmingham UK is quite a bit bigger than the namesake in Alabama. The “celestial city” is the second biggest city of the UK.
The OP doesn’t require either of the places have major significance. I’m sure there are many unimportant towns named for indignificant towns elsewhere. Just one example would be Watervliet NY (suburb of Albany) named after Watervliet, Belgium, a rather unimportant place over there. I’m sure there are many more of these.
That is, I think, the best pair named so far, as both cities are of international repute. It made me think of another Spanish/Latin American couple, the two Cartagenas in Spain and Colombia.
That makes me think of an ancient example: Qart Hadasht, better known today as Carthage. It means “new city” in Phoenician. When the Carthaginians founded another city on the Iberian peninsula, they gave it the exact same name. The Romans apparently couldn’t handle two cities with the same name (how did the Carthaginians manage?), so they renamed the second one Carthago Nova, i.e. New Carthage, or “new new city”. We now know that second one as Cartagena.
My home town of Dunedin New Zealand shares a name with a Dunedin in Florida. I don’t know much about the latter, but as mine is an insignificant minor port, maybe they match up.
The OP made it clear they were interested in comparing towns where one is named for the other. They don’t have to be named exactly the same, since one comparison they made was York to New York.
I can’t think of a better example than the two Birminghams.
But my entry is Rochester, New York and Rochester, Minnesota. The New York one is larger, but the MInnesota one is as often or more often in the country’s consciousness due to the Mayo Clinic.
Well, the first name that comes to mind is Dallas TX. While some in TX dispute the origin of the name, the owner of the pub in Dallas Moray Scotland has no doubts. And sells (at least back in the 1980s when I visited) a pretty good steak to US visitors to prove it.
Dallas TX: Dallas - Wikipedia pop: 1.3 million
Dallas Moray: Dallas, Moray - Wikipedia pop: 150-200
well, OK this didn’t really address the goal of the OP. But I like the story. So lets say here is an example of a city who outdrew it’s namesake.
Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada), and Halifax (West Yorkshire, UK) - although the UK one was named around 1091, and the Canadian one named after the 2nd Earl of Halifax (from the UK city) in 1749.
Monterey, California, and Monterrey, Mexico, are both named, in a roundabout way, after a man whose title was the Count of Monterrei. Monterrei is a relatively obscure place in Spain.
Years ago I looked into same-named U.S. cities that are about the same population, which isn’t exactly the same as “importance.”
Pasadena, Texas (population 149,000) and Pasadena, California (population 138,000). California’s is more famous because it’s the home of Caltech and the setting of The Big Bang Theory. Unusually, the city in Texas was named after the city in California.
They don’t appear to be named after each other, but there are cities named Springfield in Massachusetts (population 155,000), Missouri (population 168,000), and Illinois (115,000). The one in Massachusetts is famous for the Basketball Hall of Fame and the home of Dr. Seuss. The one in Illinois is famous for being a capital and its connection to Abraham Lincoln. The one in Missouri is probably less famous, though it’s the largest by population.
Carlsbad, California. When the groundwater was found to be mineral-rich, they named it after the spa town of Carlsbad, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now known as Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic). The one in California has about double the population of the one in Europe, but both their economies are based mostly on tourism.
Carlsbad, New Mexico (also named for the one in Europe, also because of mineral-rich water) has a much smaller population, but has oil and gas, and is growing.
