The Frumplingtons

The USA has some wonderful place names, and I discovered a new one while checking this blog’s visitor statistics (a grim but necessary task) this morning — King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

In Britain, you can work out something of the history of a town just by looking at the last letters of its name; names ending in -thorpe, for example, are usually places where Viking invaders settled in the 8th and 9th centuries. By contrast, in the States names often seem to have been made up on the spot, almost on a whim. So how on earth did King of Prussia get its name? Like all desperate researchers, I turned to Wikipedia for the answer. Turns out that 18,000 people live in K of P and it has the most biggestest shopping mall in the whole of the USA — so there! Oh, and it was founded sometime in the 18th century by a couple of Welshmen. But anyway, the name, the name; how did it get the name? Here’s what the Wikmeister told me:

[King of Prussia] took its name in the 18th century from a local tavern named “The King of Prussia Inn”, which was named for Frederick II, King of Prussia.

Er, right. They named it after the pub.

Lucky we don’t do that sort of thing over here in Blighty, then, isn’t it? After all, even if you like your drink, would you really want to live in a town called Rat and Parrot?