Rocky Top, Tennessee

This small Anderson County city has had three names and two identity crises. It started as Coal Creek in the early eighteen hundreds, taking its name from the stream running through town. In nineteen thirty-six, when the Tennessee Valley Authority built Norris Dam a few miles away and filled Norris Lake, the town rebranded as Lake City to capitalize on the new reservoir.

That name lasted nearly eighty years. Then the city council voted in twenty thirteen to become Rocky Top, and the change became official in twenty fourteen, borrowing the name from the nineteen sixty-seven song by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant that the University of Tennessee has played so many times at football games it became one of the state's official songs. The hope was that football fans heading to Knoxville on Interstate Seventy-Five would stop.

It was a gamble on nostalgia, and the new name has stuck.