About 1 in 10 GNIS Named Features Is a Church

Ledger + structural cultural-geography thesis. The ledger is the top-25 most common GNIS feature names by instance count, plus the church-keyword aggregation. The thesis is twofold. (1) The single most common named geographic feature in the United States, by count of distinct mapped instances, is 'First Baptist Church' with 2,804 instances. The next two are 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' (2,264) and 'Church of Christ' (1,743), and the first non-religious entry is 'Mill Creek' at rank 4 with 1,484 instances. 9 of the top 15 most-common names are religious. (2) Aggregating by religious-building keyword, 235,216 of the 2,287,557 GNIS features (10.28 %) are churches or other religious buildings, drawing from 99,949 distinct names. Public commentary on US toponymy usually emphasises pioneer towns or natural features without quantifying that more than one in ten USGS-named geographic features is a place of worship — a structural fact about how the United States has been mapped, and historically has chosen to map itself, that I could not find stated as a single pinned percentage anywhere.

The US Geological Survey keeps a master database of every named geographic feature in the United States — every creek, mountain, ridge, town, building, school, post office, cemetery, and so on. It contains 2.28 million entries. I wanted to know what the most common place name in America actually is. So I downloaded the whole thing, lower-cased everything, and counted. The answer is surprising. The single most common name in America — meaning, the name that the most distinct geographic features share — is 'First Baptist Church.' There are 2,804 of them in the US Geological Survey database. Right behind it: 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' (2,264), 'Church of Christ' (1,743). The first non-church on the list is 'Mill Creek' at fourth place with 1,484 instances, and from there the list alternates between creeks and churches: 'First Presbyterian Church', 'Spring Creek', 'Dry Creek', 'Mount Zion Church', 'Bethel Church', 'Bear Creek', 'First United Methodist Church'. Out of the top 15 most common names in the entire United States, NINE of them are churches. Then I asked: of all 2.28 million named features, what fraction are churches in total? The answer is 10.28 % — over 235,000 named churches in the US Geological Survey database. One out of every ten map labels in the country is a place of worship. That is a much higher fraction than you'd guess if you asked a person 'what's on the map?' before showing them the data. Most people would say creeks, mountains, towns, schools — they wouldn't put churches first. The data says: churches first, by a lot.

2804 first baptist church · 2264 the church of jesus christ of latter day saints · 1743 church of christ · 1484 mill creek · 1356 first presbyterian church · 1342 spring creek · 1231 dry creek · 1102 mount zion church · 1079 bethel church · 1047 bear creek · 984 first united methodist church · 921 kingdom hall of jehovahs witnesses · 907 mud lake · 854 rock creek · 835 church of god

religious 9 / non-religious 6 · top non-religious entry: Mill Creek (rank 4, 1,484 instances)

2,287,557 total features · 1,378,602 distinct lowercased names · 99,949 names containing a religious-building keyword · 235,216 feature instances under those names · 10.28 % of all GNIS features