It’s no secret that Grantville is based on the real town of Mannington. Eric explains how the name came about.
– Bethanne (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
[I didn’t copy the date and time on the first posts I copied, which are generally the most recent]
Grantville is a composite of the names of two towns in the area: Grant Town and Barrackville. I had originally planned to model my fictional town on Grant Town, because that’s where the power plant in the area was located. (I needed both a power plant and a high school to make the plot work, and I knew I’d have to move one of them. Moving a high school seemed a lot simpler.)
But when I came to the area in 1999 to do the research, I discovered that in the 20 years since I’d lived there in the late 70s, a lot had changed. A couple of big malls had opened up on I-79 between Morgantown and Fairmont, not far east of the various small towns along US 250. They’d sucked the life out of the downtowns and turned them into bedroom communities, which is not what I needed. So I drove west to see what might still work. Barrackville had suffered the same fate, but Mannington (which is the westernmost of that little string of towns) was far enough from the malls to have remaining a fully rounded town. The high school is located just outside of Mannington so I switched my plans and moved the power plant.
Voila. Such were the origins of “Grantville.” It had nothing to do with Ulysses Grant or any other person named Grant so far as I know. (Don’t ask me who Grant Town is named after. I don’t have a clue.)
