LOTS OF talking about vice-presidents lately. Kamala Harris is the nation’s current vice-president, and JD Vance and Tim Walz are vying for her position.
On the Maine-Canadian border sits the town of Hamlin. Named for Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s vice president. He is buried in one of America’s prettiest graveyards, next to 10 Congressmen, 2 Ambassadors, 4 Governors and 8 Civil War generals. Stephen King filmed Pet Sematary there.
There are many more towns named after a vice president, including Fairbanks, Alaska. Charles Fairbanks served under Theodore Roosevelt, after Teddy himself had also been vice president. You’ll find Roosevelt, originating from Tholen in Zeeland, in town names on Long Island, in Utah, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and twelve other states. However, most of them are in honor of his presidency, not of his job as second fiddle. As for his understudy Charles, there is in addition to Alaska a Fairbanks in Minnesota and one in Oregon .
THE VICE president with by far the most towns to his name is Schuyler Colfax, descendant of Amsterdam and Nijkerk, Veep under President Ulysses Grant, who himself was rooted in Leiden: 15 towns and a mountain. Runner-up is Thomas Hendricks: Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, West Virginia and Michigan. He was Grover Cleveland’s vice president, one of 8 Dutch Americans who held the position: beside himself and Colfax, Martin van Buren from Buurmalsen, Garret Hobart from Wemeldinge, Roosevelt from Oud Vossemeer, Jerry Ford from Durgerdam, Nelson Rockefeller from Breskens, George Bush Sr. from Hardenberg. He himself, Thomas Hendricks, was rooted in Midwolde in Groningen, home of grandpa Menno and grandma Renske.
The reason why he had five towns named for him was a tragic one. Eight months after he took office, he died in his sleep, all of a sudden. It was 1885, the heyday of newspapers, it was big news and it spread like wildfire. The president and the entire cabinet attended the funeral, in Indianapolis, and ten thousand people stood there watching the mile-and-a-half long procession.
THIS USED to be a typical American way of paying tribute: after president Garfield was assassinated, parents en masse named their children James Garfield, including the grandfather of Jim Davis, who went on to name the cartoon cat Garfield after Gramps. President William Henry Harrison died, and promptly hundreds of thousands of babies were named William Henry, not realizing that Harrison himself was named after Dutch stadtholder Willem III, who was also king of England and therefore of America as well: William Henry of Orange-Nassau. Lincoln was assassinated, and 205 cities and towns were renamed Lincoln.
Thomas Hendricks died, and Eden in West Virginia became Hendricks. Elgin in Kansas too. Hendricks in Indiana already had its name, for an uncle of Thomas’s, but now mainly named for Thomas himself. Michigan’s Naubinway also became Hendricks, as did a new development in Minnesota where, while they were at it, they also named streets after the dead Lincoln and Garfield. They also included another vice president who died in office, Sophia van der Veer’s son, Garret, originally Gerrit, Hobart.
There are five Hobart towns in America, in New York, Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma and North Dakota. But Gerrit from Wemeldinge apparently made less of an impression than Thomas from Midwolde. Only Hobart, Oklahoma is named directly after him.
