Something has been bothering me since I mentioned the town of Washington, Virginia recently in Flip-Flopping. It claims to be the oldest town named for George Washington, platted by none other than George Washington himself in 1749. I noted that it’s often called Little Washington to differentiate it from nearby Washington, DC which dates to 1791. "Little" Washington is only 68.7 miles (111 kilometres) from "Big" Washington according to Google Maps. Was this the closest distance between two towns that share the same name?
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Washington to Washington
It was not, by the way, but I’ll get to that later.
I began by establishing some ground rules.
- The names had to arise independently although they could originate from a common source. Both Washingtons were named for George Washington. Clearly the city of Washington was not named for the little village in rural Virginia, though.
- They could not be part of the same basic metropolitan area. Kansas City (Missouri/Kansas), St. Louis – East St. Louis (Missouri/Illinois), Niagara Falls (New York/Ontario) and similar occurrences were specifically excluded. See how I crossed an international boundary on that last one? Right. The two Congos fell into this same category and I tossed that possibility from consideration too (plus, they’re countries not towns).
- They both had to be "meaningful" places. That was subjective. I defined it to mean that they both had to appear as labeled places on Google Maps. In the event of an approximate tie I would consider it better if each town was large enough to have a government and a web presence. Washington, Virginia is the seat of government for Rappahannock County in addition to being a town in its own right, for example.
- Google Maps would also serve as the final arbiter of distance using simple queries such as "Washington, VA to Washington, DC." No lat/long coordinates or street addresses could be used to shorten distances.
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Greenville to Greenville
I began by consulting Wikipedia’s list of the most common U.S. place names and I figured I’d start with those found in Rhode Island. None of those towns would be very far from a state border by definition. The same would hold true, relatively speaking, for neighboring Connecticut and Massachusetts. That winnowed the list down to Greenville, Riverside, Kingston and Newport for Rhode Island. I didn’t get any cross-border cooperation, though. Nonetheless and to my surprise, Greenville, Rhode Island to Greenville, New Hampshire — crossing through the entire width of Massachusetts — scored very well at 79.6 miles (128 km).
I also uncovered an odd Google Maps glitch, and I’m not sure if it was specific to me or whether it will be repaired before someone else attempts it. I tried to route from "Greenville, NH to Greenville, VT" and it calculated a 0.4 mile path to Panda Wok. I wonder how much Panda Wok paid Google for that nifty little trick?
Then I started getting a weird sense of déjà vu, like maybe I’d already published this article before. That possibility dawned on me as I examined other common town names on the list, particularly Franklin. I worry about the day that it will happen, and believe me it will happen someday. I now have several hundred articles under my belt and it’s hard to keep them all straight. Today is not that day. I searched my archives and found that two Franklins appeared in The Jeffersons and Beyond in a different context with a distance of 102 miles (164 km) between them.
While I was at it I also observed Washington, Maryland on the list and compared it to Washington, DC. It did almost as well as Washington, VA, at 69.7 miles (112 km); only a mile farther! (map). Mostly though, the list was a bust.
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Lens to Lens
Then I transitioned to the desperation method. That involved looking near state and provincial borders for similar towns, and failing that, moving on to national boundaries. Languages tend to slop across European borders so maybe I could find something there. I spotted Lens in northern France and focused on it only because it was a short name. Could there be a Lens in Belgium. Yes, and the distance between them was 66.5 miles (107 km).
I found the best answer of the day completely by luck.
Now I turn the challenge over to the wise and all-knowing 12MC audience. I think there has to be better occurrences, probably numerous ones, that meet the four basic criteria.
It’s wonderful when an article results in a comment that inspires an article, creating a self-perpetuating geo-oddity cycle. In this instance loyal reader "Pfly" mentioned the curious case of Guadalupe, California which nearly changed its name to Guadalupe Beach even though it was located several miles from the nearest beach.
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NOT On The Beach
Local political leaders hoped that a name change might attract tourists and their wallets. They were so hopeful that they kept a 6% hotel tax in place even though they had no hotels. The town put the name change to a vote on November 6 and residents shot it down 67 to 32 in a victory for common sense.
That triggered a hazy memory of another town that changed its name recently for creative marketing purposes. I couldn’t put my finger on it and it nagged at me for awhile until I finally remembered. How could I have forgotten Bikinis, Texas!
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NOT A Town
Bikinis may be hasty. At the moment it’s still known as Bankersmith and calling it a town may be more than a minor exaggeration. By "known" I mean it’s recognized as a place name by the U.S. Geological Survey and not much more. Ghost Town would be more appropriate. There’s almost nothing left of it anymore. I turned to one of my favorite sources for some context, the Handbook of Texas Online from the Texas State Historical Association:
Bankersmith, located ten miles southeast of Fredericksburg in extreme southern Gillespie County, was established by Rudolf Habenicht in 1913… named for Temple Doswell Smith, president of the first bank to be established in Fredericksburg… At its peak in the 1920s Bankersmith had a store, a dance hall, a lumberyard, and about fifty residents. In 1924 Rudolf Habenicht sold approximately 280 acres, including the town of Bankersmith and any unsold lots, to Louis Klinksiek. The population fell to ten by 1930, and the railroad abandoned its track in 1935. Klinksiek later purchased the remaining lots after the rail line was abandoned and gained back the railroad right-of-way… Much of the area land, including the former townsite, remained in the Klinksiek family in the 2010s.
Some guy who runs a bunch of sports bars featuring scantily-clad women as waitstaff bought Bankersmith in July 2012. He intended to rename it Bikinis as a publicity stunt for his business of the same name, and promptly posted a website (with plenty of news coverage and fanfare). The only flaw in his plan is that nothing much remains of Bankersmith and it’s doubtful that it could be renamed Bikinis officially. I’ll admit that Bikinis is a memorable name. However a forgotten corner of the Texas Hill Country seems an unlikely candidate for Bikinis.
Agrandir le plan
NOT a Past Participle
There is also a town called Eu in France that was considering changing its name at least as recently as February 2009 because of Internet confusion: "Anybody entering the word ‘Eu’ in a search engine is likely to get a number of results, but most will be a reference to the past participle of the French verb avoir (to have), not to the pretty market town in Normandy. The search also brings up pages related to the European Union" according to the source.
Thus the situation of Eu is different from the other two instances. A name change wouldn’t be intended to make it sound more attractive nor would it be a publicity stunt. It would be an attempt to help people find the town amidst the clutter of the web.
Of course nothing tops the naming of Greenland by Eric the Red for sheer marketing exaggeration, assuming one believes the old legends.
I had a conversation recently with my friend the birder. He pointed out various bird species that happened to fly within line-of-site of our gathering, while noting which ones were native species and which ones were transplants. That led to discussions of various invasive animals introduced into North America either by accident or by design, and the havoc those alien encounters sometimes introduce.
I’ve talked about Zebra and Quagga Mussels in the Great Lakes before as well as Asian Carp in the Mississippi watershed. Those are good examples. Closer to home, we’ve had to deal with Snakehead fish and vicious Tiger Mosquitoes. Let’s not forget those ghastly primates, those homo sapiens either. They’ve been causing trouble everywhere.
We tend to think of ourselves in North America as the recipients of every other continents’ castaway pests. However, it’s not a simply one-way street. There are plenty of cute and cuddly North American animals that we’re used to seeing every day that have become a nuisance elsewhere, even pushing native species to the brink of extension in the most extreme instances.
Take for instance the prime example I used during my conversation:
Eastern Gray Squirrel
SOURCE: Flickr via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.
In the United Kingdom it’s spelled slightly differently, Grey Squirrel, and it’s become a major problem because it competes with the native Red Squirrel. The Global Invasive Species Database explains that "Eastern gray squirrels were introduced to Italy and England from the U.S., to Scotland from Canada and to South Africa and Ireland from England."
In the UK, grey squirrels have pushed native red squirrels northward. The cannot live within overlapping ranges because grey squirrels are larger, more competitive and voracious eaters. Grey Squirrels also have immunity to diseases they carry and subsequently spread to Red Squirrels with harmful results.
Groups in the UK such as the Red Squirrel Trust Wales and Cornwall Red Squirrel Project are attempting to push the clock backwards by reintroduce red squirrels into their previously-native habitat, for example:
The aim of the project is to re-introduce Britain’s native red squirrel into Cornwall. Red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) were common in England until the grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) was first introduced to the UK from America as an ornamental species in 1876 and to Exeter in 1915. The spread of the grey squirrel was rapid, and in 36 years the species had reached Cornwall. The last of our native red squirrels was seen in Cornwall in 1984.
It’s hard to imagine the damage caused by these common mainstays of the eastern North American outdoors when exported elsewhere. I will note one more quote — completely irrelevant by the way — from the Invasive Species Database primarily for the benefit of all my relatives in Mississippi, "Grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) are harvested for food in Mississippi (USA)." For the record, my family does not eat squirrels. Also I should note that squirrels are hunted in many different places, not just Mississippi (case in point). I don’t understand why the database singled-out Mississippi.
If we’re talking about animals more-or-less commonly eaten, perhaps we should also note:
Canada Goose
SOURCE: Flickr via Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.
Wikipedia has a nice map of the Canada Goose range, including it’s non-native habitat. I wasn’t too surprised to see that they had been introduced to Europe. However they’ve surged in population in recent years. The Guardian focused attention on an emerging problem in France.
There are certainly so many of them in France that they are beginning to pose a threat to wetland biodiversity. The Canada goose is the largest goose found in Europe. It was introduced to Britain in the 17th century, then adopted as a game bird on the continent during the last century. In the wild they live 10 to 25 years and are prolific breeders. They are now resident in western Europe and, for reasons that remain obscure, their numbers have started increasing very fast. There were only several hundred Canada geese in France at the end of the 1990s. Now there are more than 5,000 spread over at least 58 départements, with half in the Paris area.
Canada Geese are also an issue on the other side of the world in New Zealand. NZ Birds traces their origin to "a gift from US President Theodore Roosevelt" in the early 20th Century and that "there are now so many of them they are sometimes regarded as a pest." Gee, thanks Teddy. He probably deserves to lose every race at Nationals baseball games simply because of that.
Birds are not the only creatures that have been transplanted from North America for the benefit of sportsmen.
Largemouth Bass
SOURCE: Flickr via Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.
The Largemouth Bass is a mainstay of anglers particularly in the southeastern United States where they are quite common. They are considered a great sports fish. Freshwater bodies literally around the world have been stocked with them as a result. Unfortunately Largemouth Bass are also extremely aggressive and hungry. They can destroy local native fish populations without much effort.
The Global Invasive Species Database includes Largemouth Bass too, and it notes:
Largemouth bass are highly adaptable fish, able to thrive in virtually every warm-water habitat, from small creeks to large rivers to huge reservoirs. About the only thing that limits them is cold annual water temperatures… Known introduced range: UK, Europe, Russia, Middle East, North Africa, Continental US, Caribbean territories, South America, Asia, Southeast Asia, Hawai‘i, Mauritius, Madagascar, Fiji, Guam, New Caledonia and the US Virgin Islands.
And the one I didn’t see coming.
Beaver
SOURCE: Flickr via Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.
Beavers? Really? We even have beavers in an urban area boxed between an Interstate Highway and office towers near my home in Virginia (satellite view). Where could beavers cause a problem?
Beavers were released in Tierra del Fuego in a failed attempt to create a fur industry in 1946. Now, a little more than half a century later, the governments of Chile and Argentina are working desperately to stop their spread. Beavers are causing extensive damage to the local ecosystem, leaving a swatch of denuded forests and flooded fields in a destructive path pointed towards the north. This is all explained in an article in Nature, The Beavers Must Die. That’s the plan. They hope to eradicate the population permanently and with extreme prejudice.
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples. They are difficult to find because most of the information I could uncover related to invasive species coming into North America rather than moving the other way. Let me know if you have other favorites I haven’t mentioned.
