{"id":15618,"date":"2014-12-28T06:11:37","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T11:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=15618"},"modified":"2021-12-02T07:38:50","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T12:38:50","slug":"that-other-warsaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/that-other-warsaw\/","title":{"rendered":"That Other Warsaw"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the recent Not the City<\/a> article I focused on Richmond, not the city of course, but the county. There, the local government centered on a village called Warsaw (map<\/a>). That seemed like an exceptionally odd choice. There wasn’t a large Polish diaspora on Virginia’s Northern Neck as best as I could tell. Why name a town after the capital of Poland in a place without any discernible Polish influence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did discover the reason<\/a> soon enough. Warsaw’s original name was Richmond Courthouse which must have been terribly confusing. The much larger city located elsewhere in Virginia with the same name definitely dwarfed it. So residents changed the name<\/a> to Warsaw in 1831 in allegiance to events of the Polish\u2013Russian War of 1830\u20131831.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’d learned in Can’t Get Enough of Kossuth<\/a> that citizens of the United States often associated personally with the struggles for freedom and democracy happening beyond its borders. These clashes mirrored some of the underpinnings of the American Revolution. They resonated emotionally with many citizens of the early United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sense of solidarity even translated to the naming of towns. Warsaw was another example. Thus, GNIS<\/a> listed 51 Warsaw place names in the United States and certainly Polish immigrants settled many of them. However, a handful of others sprang up during the era of the Polish\u2013Russian War and likely derived their names from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Polish\u2013Russian War<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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