Honestly, how many places are named after Abe Lincoln? In Michigan, a lot

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday.
He’s honored in Michigan with numerous place names, including a city, a village, eight townships, dozens of schools and hundreds of roads
Place names can reflect how communities link their identity to national heroes like Lincoln, Washington and Franklin
Michigan communities also favored other Civil War icons, with more townships named for Grant and Sherman than even Lincoln

On Thanksgiving Day, Glenn Youngstedt will enjoy a family meal in Chicago, not far from Lincoln Park.

It seems no matter where Youngstedt goes, he can’t stray too far from the 16th president, who codified the tradition of thanksgiving” as a federal holiday to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

Youngstedt is supervisor of Lincoln Charter Township in Berrien County, named for Honest Abe. So was the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Park, renamed for the president in 1865 just after he was assassinated.

Since Chicago is in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” it’s not surprising its biggest city would choose to honor Lincoln.

But in Michigan and around the country, many others also honored Lincoln by naming cities, townships, schools and waterways for him.

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For instance, Youngstedt is one of eight supervisors who lead townships named for Lincoln.

There’s also a village of Lincoln in Alcona County, 42 schools that include the name Lincoln, streets named Lincoln in over 200 Michigan municipalities and a handful of lakes that bear his name.

And though Lincoln Park, a city south of Detroit, wasn’t directly named for Lincoln, it was named for Lincoln Park in Chicago, said Jeff Day, curator of the Lincoln Park Historical Society and Museum.

He also points out the local high school’s nickname is the Railsplitters.

All of those nods to Lincoln are not surprising, said Derek Alderman, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee who has studied the naming of places.

That so many American communities chose Lincoln — or Washington, Jefferson or Franklin — speaks to the “story” the communities are trying to tie themselves to.

Before the nation’s founding, many places were named after places in Europe — New Amsterdam, New England, New York.

But as the country grew and developed its own history, it used place names to weave that history together geographically, Alderman said.

“Nations need heroes,” he said, including people like Lincoln, who led the country in a war to preserve it and he had emancipated the enslaved.

“Lincoln is an important character in that plot, that story of the American nation,” Alderman said.

Michigan communities, however, liked a few other people and names even better: There are 11 and nine townships named for Grant and Sherman, respectively, two generals Lincoln leaned upon to win the Civil War.

Nationwide, there are over 150 cities, townships and towns named for Lincoln. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none are in the South.

But some states have many more “Lincolns” than Michigan: 42 of Iowa’s 99 counties have a township named Lincoln. Kansas has 28 Lincoln townships.

Alderman said often a community names itself in honor of someone like Lincoln. But other times, he said, they do it to curry favor and he recalled that a former governor of Tennessee named Knox County, where the University of Tennessee resides, for Henry Knox, the then-current secretary of war. The governor needed Knox’s help in dealing with native tribes, Alderman said.

Other times, he said, place names are simply status symbols, which improve “marketability.” It wasn’t too long ago, in 1992, that the city of East Detroit voted to rename itself Eastpointe.

“There’s always this agenda behind a renaming,” Alderman said. “They’re not always innocent.”

But Youngstedt doubts anyone will want to change his township’s name. They’ll stick with the man whose portrait is on the wall of the township meeting room.

“Lincoln was highly revered by a lot of people,” he said.