Consider James K. Polk. Not many people do.
The 11th president served from 1845 to 1849, kept his promise to serve one term and then died of cholera three months after leaving office.
On the second-to-last day of his term, he signed the act creating the Minnesota Territory, and for that, he got his name on one of the state's 87 counties.
"There are about 12 or 13 Polk Counties in America," said Polk County Historical Society President Gerald Amiot. A former county auditor and treasurer, he was reminded of that fact every time he received mail meant for Polk County in Iowa or Wisconsin.
"I think the average person might know he served as president," Amiot said, but Polk County probably does not carry a strong presidential association for many people.
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President Polk is an example of how presidents' names, through over-familiarity or obscurity, can become more associated with streets, towns, parks, bridges or schools become less attached to the men.
Great, obscure
Presidents Day is a good day to look at the presidential geography of the Grand Forks area.
Here, one can get to Polk County by driving up (George) Washington Street and then heading east across the John F. Kennedy Bridge. To the south, there is (Abraham) Lincoln Drive Park. Grand Forks had a (Theodore) Roosevelt School, now an apartment building. Roosevelt the Roughrider also lives on as a nickname for Red River High School.
The highest concentration of presidential appreciation in Grand Forks is at the Presidents Mobile Home Park near 32nd Avenue South and South Washington Street. Its avenues honor founding fathers James Monroe and John Adams (though it could be for John Quincy Adams) and several of the more obscure ones: Grover Cleveland, Millard Fillmore, James A. Garfield, William H. Taft, Herbert Hoover and either Benjamin or William Henry Harrison.
Garfield's name might be more often associated today with that of a comic strip cat and "Hooverville" remains a synonym for a shantytown.
It makes getting remembered by a county or a street look like a good deal.
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