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• Settlers sometimes made themselves feel more "at home" by naming their new town after the one they had left. Edward Tilton and other settlers named Hartford for their home town in Connecticut. Czech settlers named Tabor for a town in Bohemia. William Van Epps named Madison because the nearby lakes reminded him of the Wisconsin city.
• Other settlers honored people by naming a place after them. Dr. O. Richmond named Tyndall for John Tyndall, a British scientist. Lily was named by the town's first postmaster, Ross Parks, after his sister, Lily. Holabird owes its name to Henry Wicker, superintendent of the North Western Railroad. He gave his bride's family name to the new town.
• As for the state's most well-known geographic feature, one story goes that an eastern attorney was in the Black Hills in the early 1880s when he asked his guide the name of a granite peak. The guide, William Challis, said that the mountain did not have a name before, but would now bear the lawyer's name. Another story states that the attorney joked that he had visited the Black Hills so many times that he had earned the right to have the mountain named after him.
• The attorney's name was Charles Rushmore, and whatever the story, the United States Board of Geographic Names officially recognized the name Mount Rushmore in 1930.
• Rushmore's name, like that of John Tyndall, Thomas Hart Benton and so many others, lives on in South Dakota's geographic names.
• In 2009, the South Dakota Legislature created the S.D. Board on Geographic Names to replace certain geographic place names considered offensive. The board has established a public process and works with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. For more information, see www.sdbgn.sd.gov.
• This moment in South Dakota history is provided by the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation, the nonprofit fundraising partner of the South Dakota State Historical Society. Find us on the web at www.sdhsf.org. Contact us at info@sdhsf.org to submit a story idea.