5 Towns Whose Names Sound Like Real-Life ‘Simpsons’ Gags

5 Neversink

When New Yorkers named a new town “Neversink” in 1798, they weren’t trying to tempt fate. They named it after the nearby Neversink River. That river was named for the Algonquian words for “mad river.” So, the river got a name that meant “Mad River River,” which is already a little silly. Then the city was named Neversink. 

In 1941, New York noticed people had been feeling a bit thirsty, and they decided they needed to build a new reservoir. They flooded two towns, which meant they sank Neversink beneath 30 billion gallons of water. 

Neversink was one of the two towns condemned for that reservoir. The other was named Bittersweet. It met a sad fate. 

4 Youngtown

Retirement communities generally don’t have any youngsters as residents. There’s a good reason for this: Youngsters don’t want to live there. They’d rather spend less money to live in a better location without any of the dedicated old-person amenities that you only start to need when you can no longer reach your arms behind your back.

But in 1954, developers in Arizona had an idea for not just one little residential complex but an entire town that would be exclusively populated by people getting on in years. The minimum age would be 55. This wasn’t an elderly care facility, but a town of people in their silver years or older who didn’t want to be bothered by phonographs blaring music by that Elvis guy. They named their new city Youngtown. 

Our uneducated opinion would be that it’s illegal to ban people from a town based on their age. Apparently, we would be wrong in this case, because Youngtown received a specially exemption from Title VII of the Fair Housing Act. 

However, in 1996, a 16-year-old challenged the town’s rules. He wanted to live with his grandparents in Youngtown, due to circumstances that haven’t been made public. When a judge looked over the records, it turned out the ordinance had never been valid, due to some procedural matters that have been made public but are too boring to detail here. 

So, the founders thought they cracked a fine joke by naming their town Youngtown, but the joke’s on them because the place had to repeal its age requirement, killing the dream.

3 Frostproof

The town of Fort Clinch, Florida, formed in 1850, named for Duncan Clinch, a military man and a Georgia state rep. Clinch was known for his actions during the Florida Wars between the United States and the Seminoles. For example, there was the time Andrew Jackson had him kill the Seminoles who were assembled at Negro Fort so Clinch could capture escaped slaves, and now that we start writing his biography out, we’d really rather move on from Duncan Clinch and never talk about him again.

Fort Clinch fell apart. A new town formed on the site, named Keystone City. Then in 1892, when it was time to make things official with a post office, town leaders came up with the idea of adopting the name Frostproof. Citrus farming was all the rage, and if interested farmers heard of a city that was certified frostproof, they’d know that’s a great spot to lay down their orange crop. 

In 1894 and 1895, Frostproof suffered a freeze so harsh that tens of thousands of acres of trees died. 

The town took a decade to recover from the hit. And the post office now refused to deliver letters to the town addressed to “Frostproof,” calling it false advertising. The town was really named Lakemont, they said, after one alternate name the elders had considered. But their correction didn’t stick. Today, the place is once again Frostproof. 

2 Siren

Siren, Wisconsin, has a population of around 1,000. It formed in the 1890s when a lot of Swedish settlers found themselves in the area, and the postmaster named it Syren, after the Swedish word for lilacs. The postal service changed the name to Siren, figuring the guy had just misspelled the word, being an uneducated Swede. 

On June 18, 2001, a tornado rolled through town. It was categorized as an F3, and it demolished a bunch of houses and killed two people, while injuring a dozen more. The weather service forecast the tornado, and it sent out a warning. But this warning didn’t reach as many people as it should have. A month or two earlier, lightning had hit the town’s tornado siren, putting it out of service. 

They had been planning to fix the siren by the end of June, but they just didn’t quite get around to it. If only something about the town highlighted the importance of that particular icon. 

1 Seattle

Seattle was named for Chief Seattle, the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples. At least “Seattle” was the Anglicized version of his name, which was siʔaɬ. The French, meanwhile, called him “Le Gros,” meaning “big guy,” so if we’d all been a little luckier, the city could have been named Big Guy instead. 

Chief Seattle was a warrior for a while, but the city honored him because he turned to peace later on, g a treaty that lost him popularity with his own crew. Then, in 1865, a decade after the city chose the name Seattle, they ed Town of Seattle Ordinance No. 5, also known as An Ordinance for the Removal of Indians. No natives were now permitted to live in town unless a white boss both employed and housed them. The town of Seattle officially expelled Chief Seattle. He died a year later. 

Our uneducated opinion would be that it’s illegal to ban people from a town for the crime of being natives of the nation where the town is located. But this was 1865, and this was the northwest. Let's not forget this is the same neck of the woods as Oregon, which banned Black people from moving there right into the 1920s. 

Dammit, people told us the northwest was cool. At least now we know why Frasier chose to live there. 

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