I’m sure it was a joke, but a friend told me that Rancho Cucamonga got it’s name because it used to be a stagecoach stop…when the stage arrived, the proprietor would meet it and ask travelers, “Is there a cook among ya?”
Not too far from where I briefly lived in West Virginia, they made a Mountain out of a Mole Hill in 1949. The event was dreamed up as an advertising gimmick for Borden milk.
I’d seen the name on the map, and imagined it to have some subtle Dutch or African-language significance. So, it’s just a bit of English wordplay – I’m disappointed !
Nowthen Minnesota. Got it’s name because the towns first postmaster had a habit of saying “Now, then” in conversation.
But it’s the supposed “Indian” names in my story that put it over the top, I think. 
It might still be Dutch or Africaans wordplay: Those languages are both very similar to English.
There’s a town in Montana that’s named for the poker game where the land was won, but unfortunately I can’t remember the exact name, and it’s a small enough town that it’s basically ungoogleable without an exact match.
And Cleveland, OH was named after the first (white) settler, Moses Cleaveland. The spelling morphed into its current form when Grover Cleveland was president.
Coalinga, California, started out as a coaling station for a rail line. It is possible that it was “Coaling Station A”, with a sign that just read, “Coaling A”, eventually morphing into “Coalinga”.
El Segundo, California, is named thus because it was the site of the second Standard Oil refinery on the West Coast. “El Segundo” means “the Second” in Spanish.
Bastrop, Louisiana was named after a con man who was run out of town for scamming the local investors. He fled and then went and did the same thing in Texas, in a city now known as (wait for it) Bastrop, Texas.
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Idaho is the westernmost of the lower 48 states that does not have a namesake in Missouri, which has towns named Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada.
Show Low, Arizona was named (according to legend):
Drive east from Show Low on Hwy. 60 for a couple of hours and you arrive in Pie Town, New Mexico whose name comes from a bakery built in the 1920s that specialized in pies. You can still get very good pies there, but I think the original bakery is gone.
Baton Rouge (French for red stick) was named after a pole that marked the boundary between the hunting grounds of two native american tribes.
The town I grew up in (well, until 1976 when Houston annexed it) was originally named “Dairy” Texas, but the US Postal Service renamed it after the first name of the town’s postmistress - some woman named “Alief Ozelda Magee”, because they were getting the mail for Dairy confused with another Texas town named Daisy.
So the dinky little town of Alief, TX had its name basically come about because zip codes weren’t in place yet.
Now Alief is fully part of Houston, and on top of it, has changed over the last 30 years from a rather nice upper-middle class suburb to a horrible crime ridden ghetto populated by refuse from New Orleans post-Katrina. The only parts worth going to are the predominantly Vietnamese parts along Bellaire boulevard.
Similar reasoning lay behind the renaming of my home town in New Jersey. It was at one time called “Washington”, but in the post-independence zeal there were apparently three towns with that name in the state. Changing to “Little Washington” didn’t alleviate confusion (and probably gave everyone in town inferiority complexes), so they named the town after the river on its border.
My home town of Moleseylies at the point where the river Molejoins the Thames. If you ask the residents, many would assume the origin is simply Mole’s eye. But I’ve read a history of the town, and the assumption is wrong. In fact, it is Mul’s eg, in which Mul is the name of a man, and eg is an island, a dry area surrounded by marshes. The name Mul would be *mule *in modern English, i.e. a half breed, and refers to a man of mixed Norman/ Saxon parentage.
The river Mole’s name is of uncertain origin. There are three suggested etymologies. It may be because it sometimes flows undergroundat certain points on its length. It may be named for the mills that once lined its banks. Or it may be named after Molesey.
The high school in Christiansburg, Virginia named its sport teams the Christiansburg Blue Demons. The good white Christians were outraged. But the name remains.
Gnaw Bone, IN might be a corruption of the French name Narbonne.
Albuquerque, NM is named after a Spanish duke. Not really that odd, considering the area was a Spanish colony at the time, and the town was established shortly after the duke’s tenure as viceroy of New Spain.
Las Cruces, NM means “the crosses”. Nobody really knows why.
According to the most popular folktale, there were three crosses on a hillside, marking three graves. Depending on who is telling the story, the graves were either:
three bandits
three conquistadors
three missionaries killed by Indians
the first three Indians to convert to Christianity.
The town was not founded until long after the colonial era, so this is almost certainly not true.
Another theory holds that it refers to the crossroads of two big highways. However, “cruz” in the sense of “crossroad” is masculine, not feminine, so that would be “Los Cruces”, not “Las Cruces”. There are enough Spanish-speakers in the region that we tend to be finicky about that sort of thing.
No one has mentionedFelch, Michigan, named after Michigan’s fifth governor?
On Long Island, NY; most towns are either Native Algonquin (Indians) or Dutch. The legendary origin of Smithtown is that Richard Smith rescued a Chief’s daughter and the Chief, in gratitude, promised Smith all the land he could encircle in a day. On a bull. He took up the offer, and supposedly did it on June 21 - the longest day. 
Also, the tip of the North Fork is called Orient. “far east” and such. (The south forks end is Montauk - again named for the natives.)