“Discover America’s Most Bizarre Town Names: What Secrets Do They Hide?”
Part of the store still stands today, but the crossroads is no longer the community hub that it once was, as a road-paving project in the late 1940s allowed the area residents to easily travel farther for supplies and gossip. Also pictured above is the Ketchuptown fire department.
Tightwad, Missouri
Some locals say that this town was named for a story involving a watermelon farmer and a postal worker, almost 100 years ago. Legend has it that on his route, the postal carrier asked the farmer to save him a watermelon that he’d pick up when he was finished delivering the day’s mail.
When he returned to collect his melon, he learned that the farmer had sold it to someone else for 50 cents more than their agreed price. Enraged, the postal carrier loudly called the farmer a “tightwad” and continued to do so every day after that.
Burnt Corn, Alabama
“Welcome to Burnt Corn, Alabama, home of beautiful Murder Creek” could be the message scrawled on the town’s welcome sign, but this isn’t a Stephen King novel. No one seems to have a definite answer as to how the town got its unique name, but most of the stories agree that it arose from some conflict between the early settlers and the Creek tribe that had inhabited the area for generations.
One version has the settlers burning the Creek corn fields to drive them away. Another claims that the Creek burned the settlers’ corn to drive them away. Yet another story describes how a group of Native Americans had to leave a sick companion behind and left him with some corn to help him survive. He eventually recovered but left some of the burnt corn at the campsite. And the beautiful Murder Creek? It was named for all of the bodies that were piled up there during the Creek War.
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