More map fun this week. Sy and the gang and their science‑y stuff will return in the next post. Unless something else occurs to me.

On a recent trip coming down from Denver to Fort Worth, Texas along I‑25 and US‑287, I was struck by the slew of familiar place names I encountered. Not familiar places, mind you, but names.

About 10 miles east of Childress (in Memphis I had a neighbor family named Childress, wonder if they’ve got kin there) I spotted a forest of cranes half‑a‑mile north of US‑287. Yet another data center under construction. The site will generate heat, air and noise pollution but that’ll be well away from any population centers. However, the construction’s clustered around a slough that feeds Groesbeck Creek. I foresee litigation.

Anyway, along my route there was

• Des Moines — okay, that was in New Mexico, not Texas, but stay with me.
• Channing — the one in TX, not the one in Colorado.
• Memphis — wait, in Texas? I lived in Memphis for 40 years but that was in Tennessee and a lot bigger than this.
• Hardeman County — waitaminnit, Hardeman County’s in Tennessee, just up I-40 from Memphis
• Chillicothe — the one in TX, not any of the ones in Illinois, Missouri or Ohio
• Decatur — one of half‑a‑dozen with that name
• Fruitland — different from the other dozen scattered across the USA
• You get the idea.

My theory is that Texas has so much space and so many places that they ran out of names and started using other peoples’ toponyms. As just one example, Texas has its own “Colorado River” masquerading for the real one, which is an outrage but a story for another time. What I wanted to do was stand the name of every Texas city and town against all the rest of the country’s cities and towns, just to quantify the “borrowing.” Yes, towns, too — the population of Chillicothe, TX is only 548 (2020 census) but it counts. My computer’s good, but it’s not good enough to do the matching-up with 1224 Texas names against 19495 USA names broken out by state in a reasonable amount of time. The A.I. model I asked about doing the job said, “You couldn’t afford it.”

So I moved up to the county level. According to this Wikipedia entry, the USA has 3075 counties, including Louisiana’s parishes but excluding Alaska’s boroughs and census areas. The median count per state is about 60. Texas has 254 counties, more than any other state, naturally. That match‑up is doable and summarized in this map (click to expand).

The “Shares” color scale displays the number of out‑of‑state counties that have the same name as a given mapped county. For instance, the L‑marked county near the state’s southeast corner is Liberty County. It rates a “3” because there are Liberty Counties in Florida, Georgia and Montana.

The map’s three top-rated counties (Washington, Jefferson and Franklin) are right in line with the national totals. For some reason, Texas skipped the national number 4, Lincoln, but got back into sync with Jackson. All told, Texas shares 101 county names with other states. On the other hand, it holds 153 names (the blank outlines) all to itself.

Looking at that map raised another hypothesis — that establishing counties started in the relatively urban east where folks were familiar with what county names looked like. “Hey, there are eight other Shelby Counties, we can have one, too.” Only later did edification move westward but people there were willing to put up with names like “Deaf Smith County.”

There’s a way to check that hypothesis. I pulled Creation Date (basically when the state legislature authorized formation of a county government) data from TexasCounties.net and created another map (click to enlarge).

Yep, civilization nucleated in the east and along the state’s northern coast, then took 90 years to spread outward. I guess only a Texan could tell us why Kennedy (southern coast) and Hockley (at the base of the Panhandle) counties waited until 1921 to stand up on their own.

By the way, Elon Musk’s Starbase City is in Cameron County, 100 miles south of Kennedy County (population 350 in 2020). Pure coincidence.

~ Rich Olcott