• A. 1776
  • B. 1848
  • C. 1890
  • D. 1921

💡 Need a hint?

This body was created during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is not the president or Congress itself, but a separate federal body.

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The correct answer is C. 1890.

Many people assume that the president or Congress decides what a place is officially called. But a presidential announcement is not the same as an official registration. That task falls to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), a federal body established in 1890 to standardise geographic names across the American government.

📚 More background information

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names was established in 1890, according to the USGS. Its purpose is straightforward, if a little dry: to ensure that all federal government agencies use the same names for the same places, and to maintain those names centrally as the official reference.

Without such a body, you would quickly end up in a situation where one agency spells a river’s name differently from another, or where a mountain’s name varies from department to department across official documents. Whether that was genuinely a major problem in practice before 1890 is difficult to say, but the very fact that the body was created suggests it was.

And then there is the pub-quiz element, which is precisely why this question works: the difference between an announcement and an official registration is where most people go wrong. A name only becomes truly “official” once it has been entered into the central records, not the moment someone utters it publicly. The intuitive guess is the president or Congress, but the answer lies one level deeper.