{"id":1021,"date":"2012-03-21T20:42:31","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T01:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2012-03-21T20:42:31","modified_gmt":"2012-03-22T01:42:31","slug":"geographic-references-in-local-business-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/21\/geographic-references-in-local-business-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Geographic References in Local Business Names"},"content":{"rendered":"

This little exercise came about after I read an article on the old Northwest Territory<\/a> in the U.S., which basically consisted of all the land\u00a0west of Pennsylvania,\u00a0northwest of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. As the country expanded westward, this geographic area gradually\u00a0became known\u00a0as the\u00a0“Midwest” (or the\u00a0East North Central States<\/a> region) but not before the older name left its mark on the local culture. Organizations like Northwestern Mutual Life<\/a> (Milwaukee) and Northwestern University<\/a> (Chicago) still refer back to to the days when these places were located on the fringe of the country, not at its center.<\/p>\n

It occurred to me that researching such place\u00a0names would be a good way to see if there was still a residual\u00a0“shadow” of the old Northwest territory so I downloaded a sample list of company headquarters with the phrase “Northwest” or “Northwestern” in their names and plotted them on a map. Alas, this attempt failed to find anything significant (there was too much competition with the Pacific Northwest in name usage). However, I did look up some other regional terms with more positive results.<\/p>\n

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The geographic patterns for most of these terms are fairly distinct but there are also some areas of overlap. It was especially interesting to see regions that had local businesses in three or more categories. The old Northwest territory fits this mold with a combination of Midwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This little exercise came about after I read an article on the old Northwest Territory in the U.S., which basically consisted of all the land\u00a0west of Pennsylvania,\u00a0northwest of the Ohio River, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[27,53,62,69,99,113],"class_list":["post-1021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infographics","tag-data-visualization","tag-geography","tag-information-design","tag-map","tag-tableau","tag-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideasillustrated.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}