Galesburg won its name at the ballot box in 1837

George Gale put his own name on a ballot and won. When the settlers along this stretch of the Kalamazoo River sat down in 1837 to give their town a permanent name, they could not agree, so they did what Americans do — they voted. One man pushed for Harrisburg, after a settler named Harris. Gale countered with Galesburg. The ballots were counted, and Gale carried it. Everyone who has said the town’s name since has been reading off the winning side of a long-forgotten poll.

Before the vote the place had gone by Morton. It sat about halfway between Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, on the river, in good prairie-edge farmland — a natural spot for a town once the road and, soon after, the railroad came through. Those three things, the river, the rails, and the road between two bigger cities, did most of the shaping. Galesburg incorporated as a village in 1861 and held on long enough to become a full-fledged city in 1931, one of the smaller cities in the state.

There is a tidy little irony in the name, too: it is easy to assume “Galesburg” honors some grand figure, when really it commemorates a neighbor who showed up to the meeting, made his case, and got enough hands raised. No legislature handed the name down. No surveyor in Washington picked it off a map. Three dozen or so farmers in a frontier township decided it among themselves, and the loser’s name — Harrisburg — drifted off to be claimed by a Pennsylvania capital instead. Gale, whoever he was, got a permanent footnote out of one well-timed nomination.