[Duggys Housemate]

Pretty amazed after the success of the wire that Baltimore was not known

[Subpopulus]

Originally Posted by tac foley

Uh.............

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Munster Township, Pennsylvania
Munster, Indiana

tac

Bear in mind that that may also be of Munster, Germany, albeit without the umlaut. The Board of Geographic Names was founded in the 1890s in the US to stamp out errant exotic European diacritics and standardise US town names

Town and city names in the US endlessly fascinate me. Rarely have people ever encoutered such a huge patch of land that required naming. Mostly they just borrowed existing names from european places or named a town after some forgotten dignitary who happened to be holding office at the time. A surprising amount of US names are acually derived from indigenous names. Connecticut comes to mind, though it started as Quonectacaut, or something to that effect.

There's an excellent chapter in Bill Bryson's book Made in America on the naming practices of early America.