By Shereen Siewert | Wausau Pilot & Review
A viral Facebook post defending President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America” mixes accurate history with outdated, misleading and false claims, a review shows.
The post, which has circulated widely on Facebook in recent days, argues that the new name is not a rebranding but a “correction,” saying the lake “just remembered who it always belonged to: the U.S.A.”
That is not accurate.
Trump signed an executive order Aug. 27 directing the U.S. Department of the Interior and Board on Geographic Names to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” for federal use. The order directs federal agencies to update maps, documents and the Geographic Names Information System. Google Maps has since begun displaying “Lake America” to users in the United States.
But Lake Ontario is an international body of water shared by the United States and Canada. The international boundary runs through the lake, with New York along its U.S. shore and the province of Ontario along its Canadian shore. The American naming decision has no authority over what Canada calls the lake.
Nor is “Lake America” the restoration of an earlier American name.
Canadian government records say Lake Ontario was referred to by that name in Jesuit records around 1641, more than a century before the United States declared independence. The name is derived from an Indigenous language, although government sources differ somewhat on the precise translation.
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