The idea for this one came after I saw this semi-related map about the language of origin of every county's name. After tediously going through each "List of counties in [State]" Wikipedia pages, I finally finished this time-consuming project to see what every county was named after.
First off, there's a decent grain of salt to be taken with this map. While most counties were pretty simply and straightforward, a lot of them were far more complicated than that. The two most complicated categories were
Anyway, without further ado:
First off, there's a decent grain of salt to be taken with this map. While most counties were pretty simply and straightforward, a lot of them were far more complicated than that. The two most complicated categories were
- counties named after two things - so, for example, a county named after a geographical feature (e.g., mountain or river) that was in turn named for a person or a native American tribe
- counties named after people with long titles, perhaps of the format [First Name] [Last Name], [Title] of [Place] in which the county name is just the title or place -
Anyway, without further ado:
Not too many not-already-obvious trends to really analyze or comment about, here.
- Lots of Spanish, Native American, and natural oriented names in the west
- Lots of counties named after elsewhere locations in the northeast (thanks, uncreative colonists)
- North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia have some of the highest percentages of being named after a person (Delaware and Hawaii also have high percentages of a single category, but, ya know, having fewer than 6 counties helps)
- Somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least), there are three counties in Iowa that were named after battles in the Mexican-American War
Lastly, just because I feel like this will be a common question when you're looking at all the counties in the US, here's the top of the list (15+) of the most common county names (just taken straight from a separate Wikipedia page):
- Washington County (31)
- Jefferson County (26)
- Franklin County (24)
- Jackson County (24)
- Lincoln County (24)
- Madison County (20)
- Clay County (18)
- Montgomery County (18)
- Union County (18)
- Marion County (17)
- Monroe County (17)
- Wayne County (16)
- Grant County (15)