So I live in the Hudson Valley, upstate NY. I noticed some local place names that were surprisingly Midwestern: Mount Illinois, Ohioville, etc. Weird, I thought, I wonder how that came to be.
Turns out it was groups of settlers traveling from slightly further east -- it's only about 200 miles to Boston, the furthest-away those settlers could be starting from, on land -- hoping to colonize the fertile lands of the newly opened Northwest Territories after the Revolution who just gave up and settled here.
Now, the Northwest Territories were another 500-1000 miles west of where I'm at, and where I'm at was colonized in the 17th century, so there was no mistaking one for the other. What must of happened was, one tenth to one fifth of the way in to their journey, these settlers got their wagons stuck in the swamps here, looked around at the rocky, unplowable mountains around them, and said "fuck it, we'll settle here", before naming their town "Ohioville" so when they wrote back to Boston they could pretend they reached their destination.