In general, the Post Office never approves two post offices within the same state with the same name. Applications were frequently rejected for this reason or even for similar names. But that doesn’t prevent places without post offices from having the same name.
And as this thread shows, there’s lots of examples of such duplication and you guys have barely scratched the surface of this phenomenon. There’s some states that have over 20 places with the same name. Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama seem to be the worst about this. Probably the most extreme case is the name Five Points in Pennsylvania, for which GNIS has 31 populated places, including 6 in Mercer County alone. There’s also 21 Five Points in Georgia.
Some other examples are:
Fairview TN - 27; AL - 21; TX - 14
Oak Grove TN - 29; AR - 17; AL - 14
Midway TX - 27; TN - 22
Mount Pleasant PA - 20
Same with many towns in Oregon. It takes some getting use to, but I like it after.
“Brentwood” means different things depending on which half of California you’re in. It is a small city in Northern California. Brentwood is also a neighborhood in Los Angeles, but significant enough that it is treated as a town in its own right.
Sadly, the USPS routing system is really, really crappy. One relative of ours lives on a street that is a state name. Stuff mailed there gets re-routed all the time to that state and then bounced back. It is terrible. I even printed the postal bar codes on stuff and it still bounces.
So I wouldn’t rely on the USPS getting even simpler city name stuff right.
The percentage of stuff sent to 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue that gets routed to some random place in Pennsylvania must be amazing.
How many of them actually exist in 2017, though? I looked at the “populated places” they list in my area, and even if I exclude the ones marked as historical, most are just featureless intersections that nobody refers to by name.
You hit that a lot in PA. We have at least four “Frogtowns” (two located close to Leeper) of which I have known people in three of them. Luckily, for mailing, its usually given as the town-name of the local post office so the confusion is more when you go looking for them on the map.
There are several different towns called “Washington Township” in New Jersey. My home town was one of them, until they changed their name to avoid confusion (long before my parents were born). There still are five Washington Townships in NJ, each in a different county:
There’s also a borough of Washington in NJ, and another town that changed its name from Washington as recently as 2008.
Everything is numbered, with Streets going east/west and Avenues going North/South. So you can be at the corner of SW 10th St and SW 10th Ave. A couple miles away is the corner of SE 10th St and SE 10th Ave. Plus all the other combinations. Saying “I’m on 10th” is ambiguous unless you include the quadrant *and *the type, of which there are 6.
To boot, each town in the great mega-suburban blob has its own origin. They all used to be little farming or fishing centers separated by miles of swamp or scrubland. But they long ago all grew together and now it’s just a 25 miles wide by one hundred mile long undifferentiated mass of suburb.
Some towns put their east/west origin at their original downtown, which can be any random distance inland. Other put it at the beach and everything is numbered as X blocks west from there. Some towns grew symmetrically north & south, so the downtown origin is near the middle and addresses range from, e.g., SE/SW 51 St. to NE/NW 62nd St. Others grew mostly one way or the other, so the town’s address range runs from SE/SW 12 St. to NE/NW 180th St!
Because each town has its own origin, you can be on NW 10th Ave @ at the intersection with NW 10th St in one town, then proceed a block north on the same physical road, cross an invisible town boundary, and suddenly be driving on SE 17th Ave at SE 49th St.
That is a point. Some time ago (70s or 80s I think, possibly earlier) the USGS had someone go through all their maps and collected all the placenames on them. The USGS then published them in a book. The book was later turned into that database. And the maps could date from quite a bit before that time. So yes, it no doubt does have lots of no-longer-even-a-hamlet’s listed as populated places.
Ah I misread. Oregon’s system makes sense. The system in Florida (and possibly DC) is madness. Not all the streets were given NESW directions, but if they were, you could count on driving down N 5th St trying to find a place, to realize that it’s actually S 5th St which is parallel.
We see the same thing in the US aviation visual navigation charts.
Urbanized areas are marked differently from rural or uninhabited. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in keeping that info current versus the ever-creeping suburban sprawl in most of the US. So you’ll see little sections of “town” separated by a few miles of “rural” that was all converted to houses back in the 1970s. With one “major” road connecting the two separated towns when reality on the ground is the standard 1-mile grid.
Many of these separated “towns” at crossroads have names no local oldtimers have heard since they were kids. I think NOAA gets/got the town names from the same ancient database.
We lived on Saipan 1996-2002. There were no street names, except for the common names for the major roads: Beach Road, Middle Road, Back Island Road. There was also one short street called Quartermaster Road, but I never knew why. When we were getting our utilities set up, the lady who was taking us around the island to help us didn’t give anyone an address; she just drew maps to our apartment.
The legislature was working on naming all the streets, but we were told that there was too much quarreling to get it done. Too many Chamorro names, not enough Carolinian names and vice versa, many people demanding a street be named after dear old auntie, etc. Some time after we came back to the states, the streets did get names, but I wonder how many people stuck with the old system.
Back to the OP: There are at least two Sheep Springs in Navajoland. IIRC, they are both in Arizona.
…and don’t forget the “Courts” and “Terraces” and “Ways” that serve as in-betweeners so you have 27th and 28th Streets which are sort of through town and then between them there’s “27th Court” AND maybe also “27th Drive” to define various noncontinuous stretches that serve only a couple of blocks or are internal to developments or are cul-de-sacs off the various perpendicular Avenues. For a place with so many tourists in rental cars and elderly retirees or snowbirds from better-gridded places, SoFla sure seems to subscribe to the philosophy of “screw you if you don’t already know where you’re going”.
I already mentioned the five Washington Townships and one borough (not to mentioned two others that changed their name from “Washington”) in post #26. Your cite seems to leave off a couple of "Washington"s
Maine has a Swan Island, in the Kennebec River, and Kennebec County, which is now a state park, but was once a town.
There is also a Swan’s Island in the ocean which is part of Hancock County, Maine. This is still an active town.
