SCALES #78: Versailles as in quails
Hello!
One all-too-endless rabbit hole is learning why places are named as they are. Did you know in Ketchikan, Alaska, there are adjoining streets named Warren, G, and Harding to commemorate the 1923 presidential visit? (Appropriately, G Street is only a short spur connecting Warren and Harding.)
Taken as a whole place names tell stories about an area—a combination of where people come from; what signals of aesthetics, or exoticism, founders or speculators think will entice others to settle; which local or national figures were thought worthy of commemoration; traces of often-displaced indigenous people and culture. The embedded stories can range from the tragic to the touching to the absurd.
One gently surreal aspect of looking closely at some regional United States maps—say, in Ohio—is the piecemeal way names of other places are gleefully recycled in ways that reconfigure geography. Parma, Milan, Ravenna; East Liverpool, Oxford, Dublin. No consideration was given, obviously, to preserve existing spatial relationships: knowing the relative locations of Toledo and Seville tells you nothing about where they’re located in Ohio. There’s no clean Euclidean transformation; the names are hopelessly scrambled (not to mention the pronunciations of Ver-SAYLES, MY-lan, LY-ma, or VY-enna).
So I’ll cut to the chase: I compiled a list of places in Ohio and the places they were named after. As a way in, I made a page that quizzes you about reconfigured geography: when are the pairs of distances between locations in Ohio closer than the namesake locations? when are they further?
Here’s the page. Forty-odd locations, 10 pairs at a time. (And, as a bit of a spoiler, a complete map.)
Because this sort of thing needs some arbitrary rules: I only included place names that appear to have been named after municipalities (not countries or regions) outside the United States. (Sorry, New Albany, New Philadelphia, and Montpelier.) This rules out places whose immediate namesake are cities like Geneva, NY, Lancaster, PA, or New London, CT (making it really, New New London, Ohio). Generally Wikipedia was about as far as I went to check on this, though the Vienna Historical Society was kind enough to reply after I found their Viennapedia. This is no exhaustive list—an intriguing lead about Egypt, Ohio, possibly being named after Ägypten, Germany, came up just as this was going on press—but has enough to give a flavor of the surprising displacements.
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More serious perspectives on names and places, recently published in Belt Magazine: "Why Indigenous Place Names Matter" by Katrina Phillips; a photo essay by William Sharp documenting "Ohio's Indigenous Landscapes".
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—Adam