What’s in a Name? The Hidden History Behind Place Names

For anyone who has ever struggled to properly pronounce place names like “Eufaula” (in Alabama), “Karlsruhe” (in North Dakota), or “Fontainebleau” (in Florida), it is probably not news that many of our place names were not originally English. What you might not have thought much about is how place names provide a glimpse at the hidden history of the many people and languages that created the modern map of the United States.

The true originals

When looking only at the pronunciation or syntax (sentence structure) of American English, we might not see a lot of influence from the many Native American languages that pre-existed the colonial settlement of the New World. But it is in the names of the new places settled by those colonists where we still find traces of indigenous languages like Algonquin or Sioux.

For instance, the pilgrims that U.S. children celebrate with cornucopia wall art every Thanksgiving may have named the Plymouth colony after a city in Southern Britain that many hailed from, but the state name, Massachusetts, comes from an Algonquin word, Massadchu-es-et, meaning something like “Great hills small place,” possibly in reference to the hilly region south of Boston.

Indigenous names are a very frequent part of the American landscape. In fact, 26 out of the 50 state’s names are thought to reflect their original Native American inhabitants: For instance, we have Michigan (Chippewa), Nebraska (Oto), Mississippi (Ojibwe), Ohio (Iroquois), North and South Dakota (Sioux), Utah (Ute), and Tennessee (Cherokee), to name just a few.

Place names are often the only remaining traces of such languages, since their speakers are displaced or wiped out rather than assimilated by those who come after. A similar fate was met by the Celts in the British Isles, though they too left names like “Avon” and “Thames” in their wake.

Old name, new world

Adding to these borrowed and typically Anglicized versions of indigenous names, New World colonists also brought a bit of the old country into the new by naming cities after the places they left behind.

Brooklyn Bridge

Source: Siegfried Poepper/Pixabay

When the Dutch established a settlement along the Hudson River in 1614, they called it New Netherland, with its center known as New Amsterdam. They also settled in areas they named Harlem, Brooklyn, and Flushing in recognition of places back home. When the English took over the colony in 1664, they renamed it New York after the Duke of York, but kept many of the internal Dutch names (albeit with some pronunciation changes).

This trend of naming places after one’s mother country was a fairly common practice in colonial times, with “New England” and “New Jersey” (after the Isle of Jersey) being the seminal examples.

The Dutch and the English were not the only ones to pay homage to their homelands. In the Delaware Valley south of the New Netherland Colony was the Swedish colony known as “New Sweden,” and, in the Mexican territory to the West, we find “New Mexico.”

The French, who controlled the Louisiana territory until 1803, likewise brought a little old-world charm to the New World, with Havre de Grace (in Maryland) named for the city of Le Havre in Normandy, New Rochelle named after the French city of La Rochelle, and Montpelier, in Vermont, named after the French resort town of Montpellier.

A royal namesake

Last but not least, royal types inspired a lot of the placenames still in use today. In addition to the aforementioned New York being named for the duke of York, the very first British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, was named for King James I.

As more colonial settlements were established, kings served as frequent inspiration. Williamsburg, Virginia, was named for King William III and Georgia was named in honor of King George II. Charleston, South Carolina—originally known as Charles Town—was named for Charles II, and its main thoroughfare, King Street, also refers to him.

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Interestingly, North and South Carolina were also named in honor of a royal Charles, but this time it was Charles I, who had been executed during the English Civil War. His son, Charles II, came to power following the death of his father’s nemesis and leader of the British Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell. It was Charles II who rewarded several men loyal to his father with control of the land that would become the two states. They paid back the favor by paying tribute to his father with the name “Carolina."

Not to leave women fully out to pasture, Queen Elizabeth I’s influence can also be found in a number of place names, though it was her reputation as the Virgin Queen rather than her actual name that inspired the state name Virginia.

The birth of a new nation

In the end, whether it was the Sioux or the Dutch or the English that gave us the names that divided up the landscape of what was to become the United States, what’s most important as Americans celebrate their nation’s independence is to understand the long and multicultural history behind the places that many call home.