Two cities in the United States have the name “Hurricane,” and if you think they’re on the coast… think again.
The places where we live all have a story behind their name, although those tales can become lost to time. Sometimes the towns themselves fade away, too.
The United States Geological Survey lists about a dozen unincorporated communities named “Hurricane,” along with a few other variants such as “Hurricane Mills.” Those are all nothing more than a collection of homes today, if even that.
West Virginia and Utah both host towns named “Hurricane” that survive to this day, however.
Hurricane, West Virginia
This town of 6,400 is nestled in a valley of the Appalachians along Interstate 64. It’s about 15 miles southeast of the Ohio River and about 300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
This Hurricane go its name from a waterway called Hurricane Creek. And how did that get its name? The story goes that surveyors in 1774 found the trees at the mouth of the creek were all bent in the same direction, presumably by a fierce windstorm.
Settlers eventually created the community of Hurricane Creek Bridge around 1815, later renamed Hurricane Station in the 1870s. It got its present-day name in 1888.
By the way, if you pronounce the town the same way you do the storm, you’ll stick out. Instead, locals pronounce their town as “HER-uh-kin.”
Hurricane, Utah
This city of 20,000 in southwestern Utah is even farther removed from the ocean than its eastern counterpart. They do share something in common, though: people who live there don’t pronounce their town the same way as the weather phenomenon, either.
Commercial buildings on Main Street in Hurricane, Utah’s historic district. (Public Domain)
The wind is also the source of this city’s name. According to legend, in the 1860s, a whirlwind blew the top off a buggy that Mormon leader Erastus Snow was driving. He stated it was a hurricane and later named the place he felt the strong winds Hurricane Hill.
Hurricane is just a half-hour drive from Zion National Park and a few hours from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The unincorporated towns
“Hurricane” shows up in the USGS’s list of populated places more than a dozen other times, in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Plus, there are twists to the name–like Hurricane Deck, Missouri–among others.
Where the origin story is known, wind is again a common theme. Hurricane, Alabama actually suffered a hurricane strike; Hurricane, Wisconsin got its name “because of a storm that took many trees,” according to “History of Grant County Villages and Towns.”
Many of the fledgling settlements and villages from generations ago didn’t survive to this day. Their ghosts live on, though. Sometimes their own namesake remains, like the one in North Carolina, which was named after Little Hurricane Creek. Or, perhaps a road still carries the name, as in New York.