The fictional Simpsons city of Shelbyville was named after a person called Shelbyville Manhattan, rather than a person called Shelby. There are some real life examples of this:
In Australia, the city of Townsville was named after Robert Towns, not for a particular actual town.
In the Pacific, the archipelago of The Shortlands was named after Royal Navy officer John Shortland. Up until like a month ago I assumed it was called that because the islands were small.
Any others you can think of? I know there are a few more but I can’t think of them at the moment.
Nice one. I knew that limiting it to “generic place name” was too limiting. Any example of something that looks like it is named after a common noun, like Humansville, but is actually named after its founder would work.
“Cleveland” isn’t literally the “land of Cleves”; it’s named after an early settler named “Cleaveland” (the spelling was later shortened). But Moses Cleaveland’s name probably itself came from some place named that, where the “-land” did, in fact, mean “land”.
Similar for places named after “Washington”: In those places, the “-ton” doesn’t directly mean “town”, but George’s name came from another place where it did.
In that case, there’s the town of Weed in far northern California, which plays up the fact that it sounds like a slang term for cannabis nowadays, but was actually named after Abner Weed, founder of the local lumber mill.
I’m reminded of a joke in one of Isaac Asimov’s stories, set tens of thousands of years in the future where Earth is an insignificant backwater and the fact that humanity originated on a single planet has been lost. The Horsehead Nebula still has that name, but since nobody knows that it got that name because it resembles a horse’s head when seen from Earth (or knows what a horse is, for that matter), the popular belief is that it was named after an explorer named Horace Hedd.
Most of the municipalities in Connecticut were named after places of the same name in England (and often have descriptive names, like Hartford for a deer crossing) but a few were not. Old Saybrook was named after Viscount Saye and Lord Brooke, Ledyard was named for William Ledyard, who served in the Revolutionary War and Woodbridge was named for Benjamin Woodbridge, an early reverend in the area.
This reminds me of the geography of Greendale Community College.
The North Cafeteria, named after Admiral William North, is located in the western portion of East Hall, gateway to the western half of North Hall, which is named not after William North, but for its position above the south wall. It is the most contested and confusing battlefield on Greendale’s campus, next to the English Memorial Spanish Center, named after English Memorial, a Portuguese sailor that discovered Greendale while looking for a fountain that cured syphilis.
Newton, Massachusetts, is not named for Isaac Newton, or anyone else for that matter. It comes from “new town”. That’s probably true of other Newtons, as well.
The one in Massachusetts was the source of the name for Fig Newtons.
