Brainerd

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A city in central Minnesota, United States, situated on the Mississippi River in a lakes region popular with tourists
2. A municipality in the central part of the state of Minnesota, lying along the Mississippi River amid many lakes
3. The name of a small American city in central Minnesota that sits beside the Mississippi River in a region of lakes and pine forests

Etymology: Brainerd is a city in Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, and its name comes from a person rather than from any word for a feature of the land. In 1871 the Northern Pacific Railroad was building westward and needed a station on the route, and it named the place after Ann Eliza Brainerd Smith, the wife of Minnesota's railroad contractor and a Northern Pacific director, Jay Cooke's associate. Her maiden name was Brainerd, and the town took it as a tribute to her. The name is therefore a surname that became a place name through the railroad's naming practice, which was common across the American West, where towns were often christened for company officials, investors and their relatives. Brainerd's own surname derives from English origins, but the place itself was named directly for the woman, not for the family's ancestral line. Because the town grew around the rail depot and the lumber trade on the Mississippi, the name spread from a single station to the settlement it served.