A sign in Lynchville, Maine not far from my old stomping grounds.
Whenever I see it, I remember my grandmother telling me about buying horsemeat from a butcher?ÿ in Mexico when times were tough.?ÿ?ÿ
I'm of Finnish descent, but I was born in Norway and raised in Sweden.
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@dougie New Hampton is just one variation on Hampton, including also Hampton Falls and North Hampton, all named for the city in England.
Vancouver, B.C. was established long after Vancouver, WA was a thing. So that reference might go the other way around.?ÿ
Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have mostly place names from England where the earliest settlements were (Boston, Portsmouth, Dover, Salem), with a healthy dose of of Algonkian names (Merrimac, Natick, Nashua, Ossipee, Machias). Some of the later towns picked up names after people (Lowell, Hopkinton, Dummer) or more exotic locales (Berlin, Norway, Paris).
Speaking of Gotebo, OK as being the only one how about Monkeys Eyebrow, KY
Exline, Correctionville,?ÿ and Elkader might be unique names found only in Iowa.
Correctionville is on the 2nd correction line in the surveys of Iowa.?ÿ They have a slogan "Jog down our Main Street" referring to a few yards that the street offsets to follow section lines.?ÿ Most of the people don't realize the jog isn't actually yards, but just short of 4 miles, having accumulated convergence across most of the width of the state.
A good friend lives in Stark, NH.?ÿ The old joke they tell is, "If you don't like Stark be careful because the next town is Dummer."
The saying in Oklahoma is that if you want to get to Maud you have to go through Bowlegs to do it.?ÿ And, that's true if you are coming from the east, headed west.
Correctionville is a cool name.?ÿ Nothing like that down here in OK.?ÿ However there is a plethora of little towns with streets that are aptly named with the likes of Meridian, Range Line, Base Line and Division.
The public land survey system had been fine-tuned by the time the GLO got started on OK in the last of the 19th. century.?ÿ Every fourth east-west township line (standard parallels) contains its convergence, starting anew to the north.?ÿ This created jogs from mere links close to the Indian Meridian to hundreds of chains the further east or west of our principal meridian one travels.
Almost every lay person I speak with when I get button-holed into a conversation in the field seems to refer to the jogging of the section lines as "surveyor's error".?ÿ Of course this is misnomer, but I rarely have the patience to explain exactly why things were laid out in that manner.
I usually just smile and nod.
