text: Two Towns Named for the Same Man - Midland Daily News
  https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/Two-Towns-Named-for-the-Same-Man-7130895.php
  Two Towns Named for the Same Man
  All across Michigan are places whose names are rich with interesting but sometimes forgotten history. "Mackinac" means "big turtle," which is what the local Indians thought the now-famous resort island looked like. In 1861, while surveying a road through the Thumb area, a man camped at an old hunter's cabin where he found a well-worn hatchet-giving rise to the community known as Bad Axe. The Livingston County town of Hell offers two conficting theories as to the origin of its appellation, but this much is certain: It's not exactly the same place many of us have often been told to go to.
  In the Upper Peninsula, two towns with different names a hundred miles apart were named for the same man-though he never set foot in either one.
  The towns are Kipling and Rudyard, and the man was Rudyard Kipling. Who he was and how the towns came to honor him is a story worth retelling.
  Born a British subject in Bombay, India, in 1865, Rudyard Kipling is remembered mainly for his significant contributions to English literature. His novels, short stories and poetry earned him an immense following and in 1907, a Nobel Prize in Literature. Before the age of 40, he was acclaimed the world over for his Jungle Books, poems like Recessional and Barracks Room Ballads, and his masterpiece novel about life in India, Kim. He was an unofficial Poet Laureate of Great Britain-unofficial only because he could have had the title but declined it. His professional writing spanned 50 years until his death in 1936.
  It was in the 1890s, before Kipling was even 30 years of age, when his fame was enough to prompt one Frederick D. Underwood to name two stations on a railroad route through the U.P. after his favorite author. As General Manager of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (known as the "Soo Line"), Underwood certainly had that right, but local townspeople enthusiastically approved. The tiny settlement at the head of Green Bay on the northern end of Lake Michigan became the town of Kipling. About 30 miles south of America's third oldest city, Sault Ste, Marie, the hamlet of Pine River was changed to Rudyard.
  When the esteemed author learned of the honor, he immediately wrote to Underwood to thank him. In his letter, he said "… I write to beg you to send me a photograph if possible, of either Rudyard or Kipling or preferentially both. I shall take a deep interest in their little welfares." He may have appreciated the irony of the town of Kipling being situated next to the larger city of Gladstone, named for a famous British Prime Minister of the late 19th Century. Kipling the author didn't much care for Gladstone the politician. The former was a unabashed advocate of British imperialism while the latter worked to scale back the costly reaches of the British empire.
  Rudyard Kipling's outspoken views on the foreign and domestic policies of his day made him some powerful enemies and sometimes rattled his friends. He coined the phrase, "white man's burden," when he urged the U.S. to take a more active role in "civilizing" backward regions of the world. He so vehemently criticized America's "belated" entry into World War I that the governments of Britain and France publicly disavowed his remarks. He opposed compulsory military service but argued that a man who had never enlisted should lose the right to vote. When his beloved cousin Stanley Baldwin became Prime Minister of Great Britain, Kipling chastised him as "a socialist at heart."