For Just about as long as I can remember, I’ve heard that the city of Nome, Alaska was inadvertently named when a British mapmaker — with really poor handwriting, apparently — circled the port and wrote “Name?” next to it.
Well, that may be pretty much true, or kind of true, or maybe not true. Like a lot of things, the real “facts” tend to get lost or at least a bit muddled over the years.
So how did Nome really get its name? There are (at least) three theories about why other towns were named for explorers, heroes or politicians and this city got stuck with the unusual name of Nome.
One story is that Nome’s founder, Jafet Lindeberg may have given it that name because of a Nome Valley near his childhood home in Kavaenangen, Norway (in Norwegian, Nomedalen.)
Some say that Nome received its name by a mistake. A British cartographer allegedly copied an unclear annotation on a nautical chart made by a Naval officer while on a voyage up the Bering strait. The officer had written “? Name” next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as “C. Nome,” or Cape Nome, and used that name on his own chart. Cape Nome made the map and the nearby city took its name from the cape.
This actually did cause some confusion and in 1900, some local miners and merchants voted to change the name from Nome to Anvil City to avoid confusion with Cape Nome which was 12 miles south, and the Nome River, the mouth of which is four miles south of Nome. But the United States Post Office refused to accept the change. Fearing a move of the post office to Nome City, a mining camp on the Nome River, the merchants unhappily agreed to change the name of Anvil City back to Nome.
Another story is that a settler asked a native to the area the name of the place and received the reply “no-me” meaning “I don’t know” and the settler accepted his comprehension of that answer as the name of the place.
So like a lot of things, the debate goes on, but the bottom line is that those that liked Anvil City lost and the name Nome won out.
What we do know for sure is that Nome is the most famous gold rush town in Alaska — site of the last great gold stamped in the history of the American West. And we also know that what is now known as Nome was founded as a camp for gold miners.
Today, Nome is probably most notable for the finish line of the annual Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race.
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