https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Maine
it's roughly 3000 miles from portland to portland
Portland Or is named after Portland Maine
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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The infamous coin flip! We could have been Boston!
I do really love this town.
Bostonia just doesn't work as well as Portlandia.
Spelling it out made me wonder: theres a Portland, Iowa (Portland, IA) too!
TIL
Huh, TIL!
Minneapolis Kansas is named after how small it is. They uh... They don't know what Minneapolis means.
Portland OR was named after Portland ME because a guy won a coin toss and named it after his home town. The other guy wanted to name it "Boston."
Before that it was known as "The Clearing".
americans try to come up with a new name challenge
Springfield. No, Washington!
"how about we call the state washington and the city can be springfield?"
"Jeremiah you're a genius, now let's go kill some natives to celebrate"
TUL that cities in different states can be named the same. This is very common.
This frequently occurred when settlers named their new settlements after the regions or cities they emigrated from.
Yup. There are two cities named Frankfurt in Germany for example,
Both named after Frank? 😂
One was a river crossing point used by the Frankish tribes, the other was just this dude Frank that built a fort and was so awesome of a guy people just wanted to live around him.
I can't tell if this is a joke. If you were German I would know it's not one but there's no earthly way to tell otherwise
And one in Kentucky, but it's spelled Frankfort
But only one of them is named after a fortress built from sausages.
New England is the worst with this. They just each stole British city names, but as long as they were in different states it worked out. There's a million Burlingtons in the US alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington
"Stole" is a strong word for the very common behavior of naming things after a favored place or person, or aspirationally with something greater. There's a lot of recognizable city names in the Americas because a bunch of Europeans came over all at once, but it happened in Australia too (hence names like Victoria and New South Wales) and all over Africa (There's a Worcester in South Africa, a Sussex in Sierra Leone) but a modern push to decolonize names like that has made them somewhat less common. And there's a million places named after saints or monarchs.
It's more a metaphorical usage of that phrase. Every word is stolen from another language.
It's more that it can get a bit confusing, have had multiple times living there where they thought I was talking about the city in one state and I meant a different one.
"Stole" carries a lot of moral baggage, it implies illicit or underhanded behavior.
I'm still salty about the Geoguessr game where I found the city name on the street sign and still missed by 3000 miles.
But speaking of the wrong Portland, just wait until you learn about Springfield.
There is also a New York, Texas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York,_Texas
That was a brainfuck to me as well, I had no idea until Louis Rossmann moved from New York to Texas...
about 11 miles east of Athens.
I'm sorry, what?
Damn yo, I didn't even know that much about it.
I guess Texas is just that big, that it includes New York and Athens, Greece..
WTF indeed...
Don’t forget Paris!
We went there during a trip to the US and I made hilarious Facebook posts about "oh no, we accidentally flew to the wrong Paris" with the little Eiffel Tower with a cowboy hat on it in the background.
Got like 7 likes. Shit was so cash.
You're on 6 likes here now. You might get to relive your dream.
I giggled
Fantastic movie and even better soundtrack.
Love it. It's a shame that Wim Wenders is a douche tho.
Edit: I had forgotten about the soundtrack. Just gave it a listen. It reminds me a lot of another one of my favorites, Cat Sticks.
I got another. Athens, Georgia is only 246 miles from Cairo, Georgia. No they don’t pronounce the latter like in Egypt
I have something bigger:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York,_Ukraine
Was quite unsettled to hear that Russian troops have entered New York
Or Georgia
Classic
Also San Diego, Texas.
...and likewise a host of san antonios in california...
If we're listing weird town names taken from other states, may I present the town of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania?
Which, as it happens, is over 2 hours away from New Jersey and its only shores are on rivers.
The story on the Wikipedia page is that the men who planned out the settlement (originally called Waynesburg) had moved there from New Jersey. There was a rivalry with the town on the opposite side of the river, so the people in that town started calling Waynesburg the "Jersey Shore." The nickname held on, and the town officially adopted the name in 1826.
Though I can only imagine how the residents felt about the name during the dark times of 2009-2012.
Random fact: it's because of a rich entrepreneur from Portland that my small native town in Québec got a railway in 1850. The first international railway was between Portland and Montréal. It still exists.
I traveled out to Portland OR, in 2018 to watch the finish of the Motorcycle Cannonball run when. They ran between these two cities. It was limited to pre-1929 antique motorcycles.
Where does the cement come from?
Home depot.
Named after the Isle of Portland in Dorset
Has the symmetry gone unnoticed?