It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. Why is so much of America named after foreign countries?
Our exhaustive search of American place names discovered that one country has been a shockingly dominant source of inspiration. You’ll never guess which one.
It has come to our attention that much of the United States of America is, shockingly, named for countries that are not the United States of America.
It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. Or New Mexico. Or the Old Mexico Mine in Colorado. Or the Mexico Public Library in Maine. Our analysis has revealed thousands of places — and even more people — named after well over 100 foreign countries.
In many places, such as rural Clear Creek County in the Colorado Rockies, you can circumnavigate the globe without straying beyond county limits just by hopping from the Belgian Hare Mine to the Brazil Shaft Mine via the Lebanon Tunnel or the Mexican Gulch:
Lots of places with Norwegian names in North America.
Filatelist Hallvard Slettebø have studied especially US Post Offices, past and present, with Norwegian affiliated names: Norway in America - Alabama
Maybe some Norwegian descended members of this forum would be interested in finding out if their family name appear on a post office somewhere?
Here are Norwegian P.O. names listed state by state:
PS> There are still some Norwegian-Americans who speak a form of Norwegian that is now regarded as a separate dialect,called American-Norwegian:
Here’s a song about a little town down around San Antone. The writer of the song discovered it actually existed. He claimed he didn’t know, he just picked the words out of his head when writing & a taxicab driver told him about the place 10 years later. I’ve been there. It’s a pretty cool little town if you like those old, flat sage brush towns.
I knew about the OTH radar because of my interest in radio. Our use of such was substantially more considerate than the infamous Soviet “Woodpecker” which went blasting through great swathes of the HF bands with complete disregard of other users, to the extent that fancy receivers of the '80s had specially tailored Woodpecker filters that could be engaged to take some of the curse out of it.
Most place name in North America probably have a British origin.
Likewise, the majority of white American who care to trace their ancestry probably find some British DNA in their lineage.
That’s because a great many got free boat rides or reduced price tickets for the cruise to the ‘new world’. Effectively deported.They weren’t necessarily the best and brightest either but they made it work out for the most part. They were the Central Americans and Middle Easterners of their day. Look at how Australia got populated for another example of creative population control the British practiced.
