In a day & age of difficult transportation and poor knowledge outside one's area, there were a lot more duplicated names. If the closest "Bethel" was forty miles in either direction, who cared? Who even knew? If ten percent of the men were named John or Smith, then no surprise there were a bajillion Johnstowns and Smithvilles. It wouldn't hurt our maps to have a few non-unique towns. Natives, if they had to distinguish among them, might say Prentess-by-the-sea, Prentess-on-the-Thames, and Prentess-castle, but the map might just have three Prentesses alike.
At some point in the USA, to get a town a named post office, you had to petition the Postmaster in the capital. That worthy official would (sometimes) force a little restraint, in more ways than one. Close after the US Civil War, a spot near my home wanted to be named Jefferson Davis, after the president of the Confederacy. That name being extremely not politically correct in Washington DC just then, the Post Office's answer was NO. So they settled for a shortened and generic-ized "Jeff". Contrariwise, popular names got freely repeated - probably every US state has at least one Washington or Madison, popular founding fathers, or Lincoln (in the North :-) ).
Looking at a set of Civil War maps of Tennessee, I noticed some places that formerly I assumed to end in -s just because that was someone's name, or a plural, really were shortened versions of a possessive - 's. There were a Whole Bunch of Jackson's and Wilson's and Merritt's right next to little mill symbols and buildings at crossroads - no doubt fully-named Jackson's Mill and Merritt's Store and Wilson's Farm.
Surveyors literally emplacing new features (railroad stations, for instance) had a lot of freedom in naming them. Colorado for instance has or had a series of little towns named after the big Eastern universities the surveyors and civil engineers graduated from.
You can make a really pungent commentary on a fantasy nation's politics if you copy the one-time South American practice of General Whatizname's City and even the Generalissimo Somebody Railroad. I assume some of that was just labeling whose military command had responsibility for the area or enterprise, but some had to be grandstanding by ego-enhanced politicos.