People change their names all the time, but it’s easy to think of the names of places as being somehow finite and immutable. Not true. The reality is that places change their names regularly, and some of our best-known locations didn’t always have the same names they have today. What we used to call the country of Burma became Myanmar, Abyssinia became Ethiopia, and Siam became Thailand. Cities and towns choose new names, too: New Amsterdam became New York, Leningrad became St. Petersburg, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. Countries usually change their names because of newly won independence or shifting political allegiances; when cities change their names, it’s typically to acknowledge cultural influences or free themselves from the remnants of their colonial past. But sometimes a town changes its name for reasons that make sense only to its residents.
Out with the New, in with the Old
The most common reason worldwide for a town to change its name is to better reflect its inhabitants’ heritage. Many cities in countries with a history of colonialism have names that reflect their colonizers’ legacy, not the native inhabitants’. Over the past few decades, many cities have sought to rectify this disconnect by giving the towns more-traditional names. That’s how the Indian cities of Bombay and Madras ended up becoming Mumbai and Chennai. In Zimbabwe (which, incidentally, used to be called Rhodesia, after Rhodes Scholarship founder Cecil Rhodes), the English colonists called the state capital Salisbury. In 1982, they rechristened it Harare.
In 2005, South Africa changed the name of its capital city from Pretoria to Tshwane. Pretoria was named after Andries Pretorius, one of the early white settlers of South Africa. Although Pretorius is a hero to Afrikaners in the country, his legacy is also synonymous with apartheid. Political leaders changed the name of the city to honor an African leader who lived in the region before the Dutch colonized it.
In Ireland, when the town of Dingle was changed to An Daingean to promote the ancient Irish language, the townspeople were upset. The city, in County Kerry, is in a swath of the country where Irish is spoken frequently, but many townspeople missed the ring of Dingle. The town’s official name remains An Daingean, but most people still refer to it by the old name.
Bad Company
Sometimes, a place has to change its name to change its image. The town of Wineville, California, was the site of a series of gruesome murders, all involving young boys from Los Angeles and nearby Riverside County. The murders, which took place in 1928, were so horrific, they garnered national media attention and were the inspiration for the film Changeling. In 1930, Wineville changed its name to Mira Loma in order to escape the negative publicity that surrounded the city.
Not all cities are unhappy with their provocative or uncomfortable names, though. Near Fort Worth, Texas, voters in the city of White Settlement rejected a name change. In the 1840s, the city housed the only group of white people living among American Indians, but nowadays, many people think that the name discourages new residents and businesses from moving in. Although the chamber of commerce tried to rename the town West Settlement or Liberator Village, the citizens decided they liked White Settlement just the way it was.
They’d Do Anything for Money, Even That
For every city that changes its name to put to bed a racist or colonial past, there are cities that seem to change their names for far less altruistic reasons. In 2005, the tiny town of Clark, Texas, officially changed its name to DISH, as part of an agreement with the DISH Network. According to the deal, each one of the town’s 125 residents receives ten years of free satellite TV service, along with a free digital video recorder. The town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name in 1950, after a popular radio host announced that he would broadcast his show from the first city to rename itself after his program. Hot Springs has been known as Truth or Consequences ever since. As part of a deal with a Web site called Half.com, the city of Halfway, Oregon, officially changed its name to Half.com in 1999 to match the name of the site.
