Clearly, this will take a bit of research or luck. I noticed while driving yesterday there’s a town called East Bristol to the northeast of Madison. I’d never heard of it before. It’s 20 miles from my door, and Ive lived here for nearly 25 years.
Let’s talk about cities or towns rather than street names or other local stuff like “I never knew there was an Arbys out by the interstate.”
So take a look at Google or Mapquest and get back to me. Or, let my thread die another lonely unresponded-to death, as so many others have.
Aside from DC neighborhoods I don’t recognize, I just discovered a town called Cottage City, Maryland. It is 1.8 miles from where I lived for nearly a decade, and I swear I’ve never even heard of it before.
Around here it shouldn’t be hard to find something. We have fictional towns, and an entire fictional county, and in addition to that there are numerous small location names. Any old intersection may be Someone’s Corner, or a tiny portion of land known as Whoeversville. Those things are common in New England. In addition to that there are nearby cities with neighborhood names I don’t know.
There’s a tiny municipality on the map about 5 miles out of town that I first noticed while reading the map the other day. I’ve driven the through road many times, so it must be a two house town to not notice it for so many years.
A few weeks ago, I discovered there was a Phoenix, Illinois, (right next to Harvey, a south suburb of Chicago) when I asked Siri for the weather in Phoenix and got a forecast that was not in the 100s for the whole week. I’ve since found out that it’s a rather small village of around 2000 residents. But I have never ever heard of it before, even though it’s about 25 miles from me.
I’m in Spring (northern suburb of Houston). I’ve mostly lived around here since about 1980. (Not in the place where I now live, but not far from where I grew up and went to high school.) There’s a road near us called Mirror Lake Rd. and a subdivision called Mirror Lake. I never paid attention. The Fella looked it up and there used to be a Mirror Lake.A lake that is no longer there.
And had existed/not existed anymore in my lifetime.
I’m on the edge of Chicago suburbia so, if I drive southwest, there’s a bunch of tiny farm towns I’ve never heard of. You ever heard of Helmar, Illinois? Yeah, me neither*. I’m linking the Facebook page because they don’t seem to have a town website. It’s 19 miles away from where I live though. Looking at it on Google satellite, it’s a church, some other largish building and maybe a dozen or so houses.
*I really hadn’t. I went to Google Maps and started moving out into corn country.
Four years ago, Bueng Kan province was formed by splitting off from Nong Khai province in northeastern Thailand. I can never remember it. Nothing much seems to happen there, so it’s rarely in the news, if ever. Each time I hear something about it, it’s like I’m hearing about the place for the first time, because I just never remember it. Even now, I had to google it using some tortuous phrasing about a province that split from Nong Khai.
But closer to Bangkok are probably a lot of places over the border in Burma or Cambodia that I’ve not heard of.
We were recently driving back from some time in Wildwood NJ down at the shore. Some heavy traffic made my Waze app put me through the Pine Barrens and past a bunch of towns I never heard of. I’m usually a freak when it comes to maps and knowing my way around but for about an hour there were a bunch of places I never heard of.
Waaaay back when during my college years, some friends and I were driving around Brown County (IN, it’s beautiful!), just enjoying the turning leaves. We happened on a tiny town called Gnaw Bone. We couldn’t find it on any maps at the time, but it had a town sign - Welcome to Gnaw Bone, population 200. It was years before I found it mentioned, but the strange name stuck in my head. Finally I discovered that it had been christened Narbonne by the French trappers who founded it, but over the years became corrupted into Gnaw Bone.