You’ll see banks called “First National Bank of X”, or the “First Baptist Church of Y”. A bank or church, with the exact same name, will also exist somewhere else. I live and have traveled all over the US (specifically the Bible Belt) for years now and I’ve noticed this trend.
What gives? Maybe the answer is really obvious and I can’t put it together.
Edit: How come you almost never see the “Second National Bank/Church of X/Y”?
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I also think a lot of it had to do with placement in the phonebook. Which is why you see a lot of A-1 locations.
“Springfield Baptist Church” is fine up until Springfield gets big enough to need two Baptist churches. Then they have to disambiguate.
An easy way to do this is to adopt the “First,” because, well… they were the first, and “first” is a word that generally has a good connotation (think “first prize”). In fact, you can call yourself “First” even before there is a Second, because you’re *already* the first. It’s especially valuable if you’re in a field where reliability over time is valued, such as… well, banking or religion.
You can call yourself the “Second Whatever of Springfield,” and some organizations either do or historically did, but it doesn’t have the cachet of prestige that being “First” does. If you’re competing for clients or for butts in pews, shouting “We’re number two!” is not necessarily the best way to do that. More likely, if you’re second, you might name yourself after the neighborhood in which you’re established (e.g. Lyon Estates Baptist Church, for one in Marty McFly’s area in *Back to the Future*, as opposed to Hill Valley First Baptist), or use some other naming scheme, and you’re also more likely *to* change your name *from* “Second/Third/etc. X of Y” if you started out that way.
One thing that’s not being mentioned:
Naming things is hard. Baby name books exist because some people can’t come up with names for their children on their own.
This is still true for relatively “serious” organizations like banks and churches. There are worse names for banks. When Suntrust merged with BB&T a couple years ago, the “best” they could come up with was “Truist” which to me is one of the worst corporate branding strategies I’ve heard of. It sounds equivocal (like “true-ish”) and doesn’t give of the “authority” I think a bank should.
The church my dad went to growing up was first Baptist church, bc it was the first Baptist church in town.
At some point in its history, the congregation split and start Second Baptist church, bc it was the 2nd Baptist church in town. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same situation elsewhere.
1 shows up first alphabetically, so when you would go to a phone book, that’s the first one people would call.
Anecdote, but I’ve been doing genealogy work lately and found that my ancestors founded the first Lutheran church in the area. It’s not the same building anymore but it was and still is called the First Lutheran church.
I’ve seen many second church of Christ the scientist. The name is misleading because they are an organization that staunchly believe in prayer healing. To the point that some let their children die before going to a medical doctor.
To give a local anecdotal example, the Midwest US Baptist church that I used to attend is approaching its 200th anniversary as a congregation, which is pretty damn old for a US church. The congregation began as a house church in the early 1800s and met in a local barn, and was named as the “Baptist Church of _____ and ______ Township”. In about 1825 the nearby village, which was founded by transplanted New Englanders, established their “village green” and designated the 4 corners of the green as land owned by the village where churches would be built for the good of the community, similar to the village greens in New England.
The First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, First Methodist Church and First Episcopal Church were built over the next 10 years, as money was raised by the congregations to hire preachers and build the churches. More than just reflecting “naming rights,” the names reflect the pride of the community at reaching the milestone that they had grown to the point that they could support those four congregations. In the 1800s the churches were literally at the center of the growth of the town – they created the local men’s and women’s colleges (now merged into a nationally recognized university), were the meeting places for village business, and remain important local institutions. Even in larger cities it’s likely that the city grew from a bunch of small neighborhoods, and sometimes that “First Church of Bob” was founded by the neighborhood as a proud sign that the community had grown large enough to support a gathering place of their own.
I always wanted to open a church with the name “third” in it and then tell anyone asking that “we don’t talk about what happened at the second.”
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