A city by any other name: port towns and fort towns

Do you live in a port town or a fort town?

Have you ever thought about the name of your town or city? Why does it have its current name? Is it a regional name, is it named for something or someone, does it have a purpose built name? Does a city by any other name truly carry the same meaning? Over the last couple weeks, I’ve looking through nearly 40,000 city, town, and census place names to see what trends exist. I’m calling this series “A city by any other name.” Today’s article is about “port” towns and “fort” towns.

Does a city by any other name mean the same thing?

Port towns and fort towns

The United States has a long history of naming their cities and towns after either a port or a fort. Does being a port town actually mean the town has or had a port? Does being a fort town mean that the town has or had a fort? When you start looking at all these different places, you really start to wonder if the names matter at all.

Take Portland, for example. Which Portland am I referring to? Is it Portland, Oregon (the largest Portland), or Portland, Maine (the original Portland)? Or is it one of the other 16 Portland’s across the country? And does being a “Portland” really mean it’s a land of ports? Not likely. In fact, one such Portland is on the southern edge of Kansas, is tiny, and has no ports whatsoever.

And then there’s Fort Worth, the largest fort town. Fort Worth was the location of an army outpost in the mid 1800s established during the Mexican-American war. However, today there doesn’t appear to be a fort anywhere within the city. In fact, the most famous fort in the region is actually a few hundred miles south in San Antonio: The Alamo. Fort Lauderdale is another popular fort town. It was actually named for three forts built during the Second Seminole War. However, just like with Fort Worth, no fort currently exists as far as I can tell.

Are there more ports or forts?

Just to add some fun analysis to this, here is some data on the two groups of towns and cities. It’s particularly interesting that there’s almost as many port towns as there are fort towns. However, there are far more people actually living in fort towns, despite Portland, OR being the largest city among the entire group of ports and forts.

Looking at place names critically is an important exercise. The name of your home town or city hold a special place in your heart, whether you like the place or not. But why are these places called what they are? This series will continue to explore these kinds of trends in place names by looking at interesting combinations of city and town names.