Interesting Resource for Study of Place Names

A couple of days ago, I mentioned an ongoing project at work to prune our Reference Collection. A lot of the materials are just being relocated to a storage location or to the regular circulating collection. The resource I'm featuring today is going into storage. It can still be used by persons, but a staff member will have to pull it.

Barnhart, Clarence L., ed. The New Century Cyclopedia of Names. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954.  3 vols.

[v.2, p. 2178]

Jefferson City. [Former name, Mossy Creek.] Town in E Tennessee, in Jefferson County, NE of Knoxville, in a zinc-mining area: manufactures of iron, and cotton and wool textiles. It is the seat of Carson-Newman College. 3,633 (1950).

[v.2, p. 2840]
Mossy Creek (môs´i). Former name of Jefferson City, Tenn.

Why did I choose these entries? Quite simply to show that some dictionaries which include place names may include former and/or latter names of places.  If I had an ancestor who fought in the Battle of Mossy Creek and did not know that Mossy Creek was now Jefferson City, this would be a good means of learning that fact.  It also gives me a brief profile of the community as it existed in the 1950s.