something cool i found out while looking through the cities on that atomic bomb map is that canton, ohio is named after...
something cool i found out while looking through the cities on that atomic bomb map is that canton, ohio is named after guangzhou, china (but the old time version of the name, obviously):
Bezaleel Wells, the surveyor who divided the land of the town, named it after Canton (a traditional name for Guangzhou), China. The name was a memorial to a trader named John O'Donnell, whom Wells admired. O'Donnell had named his Maryland plantation after the Chinese city, as he had been the first person to transport goods from there to Baltimore. [x]
probably one of relatively few cities in the united states named after another place that’s not in europe
I live in a town in Michigan that was formerly called Nankin Township, after Nanking, China.
The city next door used to be called Peking Township, for a similar reason.
And the other city next door is still called Canton, Michigan.
Apparently the Post Office rejected all of their original suggestions for town names because there were already similarly-named Michigan towns, and they ran out of ideas until finally they just decided to name them all after places in China.
Amman used to be called Philadelphia, but Penn probably wasn’t thinking of it when he named the city in Pennsylvania.
There’s even a place with the same name as a location in Africa: Numidia, Pennsylvania. But this is also a coincidence – it was supposed to be “New Media” – and its population is >99% white.
Newark, New Jersey, was “New Ark of the Covenant”, because the American frontier has always been full of religious weirdos
Newark, Ohio was named after Newark New Jersey, and is in turn the namesake of the Newark Holy Stones, kind of a more competent but less successful version of the seer stone/golden plates(/Voree plates) of Mormonism that were “discovered” in a pre-Columbian underground complex
because “how can the Americas have a place in the world whose central narrative derives from the Hebrews they’d been completely isolated from” was a matter that rated quite some contemplation back then, and “ancient Hebrews” were the “ancient astronauts” of the 19th century, and the American frontier has always been full of religious weirdos