Our local elementary school is the Bradt School, which fits the topic phonetically.
He must have had a awfully good win-record against every other lawyer in town, to keep getting elected.
Since it’s been in the news lately, I had a similar assumption about the business Florsheim Shoes. I had vaguely assumed that, since I only experienced it in the form of physical Florsheim-branded stores, that “-heim” meant “home of” as found in Nordic languages. I didn’t know what “flor” meant – apparently in Nordic languages it means “flower” rather than “floor” – but if I had thought about it I might have thought the full name meant “home of things you’re going to be putting on the floor”.
It is of course named after Milton Florsheim.
I’ve got one: Northwestern Glacier on the Kenai peninsula in Alaska is not named after a geographical location, as you might expect. It is instead named after Northwestern University in Illinois.
Interesting. It would never have occurred to me it was anything but someone’s name.
The era of WAG 1850 to 1940 most every company was named by the founder for themselves. Or something simple like “Standard Oil” or a region like “Allegheny Railway”.
The use of coinages for corporate or brand names is a creation of modern marketing. Made up brand names got started late 1800s, but didn’t really take off until a couple decades later. Made up words for corporate names mostly waited until after WWII.
The classic example of a “Shelbyville” brand name is Max Factor cosmetics: it sounds like it’s supposed to evoke some kind of “max(imum) factor,” but it’s actually named for its founder, Max Factor Sr. (born Maksymilian Faktorowicz).
Kodak, for instance, dates from 1888.
Delanson, NY sounds like it’s a person’s last name.
It’s actually derived from the DELaware ANd hudSON Railroad, which had a railroad yard there.
Good one! It appears that Northwestern Glacier is in fact in the southeastern part of Kenai Fjords National Park, which in turn is on Alaska’s southern coast.
And you would expect Northwestern University to be in, you know, the Northwest. Which it is distinctly not, having been named after the Northwestern Territory, which stopped existing some 50 years before the establishment of the university.
OTOH, it (the glacier) is a decent distance Northwest of Northwestern University in suburban Chicago. 
Dating as the university does from 1851, the formal Northwestern Territory may have been (recent) history, but it wasn’t that far from the then-current northwestern frontier of civilization. There were US settlers further west then, but civilization sorta ended right there in Chicago
I’m not sure I’ve heard “Chicago” and ”civilization” in the same sentence before.
(I may have lived in St. Louis too long.)
As a former St. Louis resident (city proper; not no steekin’ burb!) I understand and agree.
St. Louis is elegant; Chicago is a vulgar brawl.
Although not a place, I used to be confused by the fact that Northwest Airlines was headquartered in Minneapolis. From a modern perspective you’d expect an airline called Northwest to be based in, say, Seattle. But they also apparently got their name from the Northwestern Territory.
On the other hand, the airline actually based in Seattle is… Alaska Airlines. Which I guess sort of make sense since Seattle historically has had close economic ties to Alaska, and it’s the logical connecting point for travel between Alaska and the Lower 48.
The early & IMO proper name of Northwest Airlines was Northwest Orient Airlines.
They operated throughout the northwestern quadrant of the lower 48 USA domestically, plus Alaska. And launched out across the Pacific in a northwesterly direction to reach the northern Orient. So IMO pretty northwestern in orientation despite where HQ was cited.
A few mergers later and as “orient” came to be seen as racist or something, but definitely archaic, they dropped that word from their corporate tradename. But their primary catchment area hadn’t changed: the NW quadrant of the CONUS, Alaska, and the northern Pacific.
The informal corporate motto of the domestic division was: “It’s cold; it’s dark; but it’s ours!”
The Hand melon – a type of sweet muskmelon popular with the upper crust – was not named for the body part, but because it is grown at the Hand Melon Farm, named after Alan F. Hand, who first developed them.
I’m sure almost everyone knows this, but Chicago’s Midway Airport isn’t midway between any two landmarks. It’s named for the Battle of Midway in WWII. I wonder if there are any other airports named after a battle.
That would be “an baile ar an mbealach go dtí an móinéar.” I can see baile (bahl-ya) and móinéar (moyn-yeer) maybe slightly fitting into this narrative. But it’s a stretch.
The Scots Gaelic is closer, both in geography and pronunciation: “am baile air an t-slighe chun na mòintich.” I’m no expert on their pronunciation, but the consonants are much sharper, and you’ll see there’s a ‘t’ in “mòintich”.
My money is on returning Scots Gaels for this one.
I tried doing a similar thing in the future history I write for, set ten thousand years in the future; but it turns out that nebulae like the Horsehead are fairly ephemeral things, and by the year ten thousand it will look completely different, if it exists at all.