Historians! Back in the homesteading days, how were people allowed to establish a town in their name?

Question

Did they have to be ownners of most of the land in the area? Who decides how a town is named?

Answer 1

the community named the town. Just a basic popularity contest.

Ofcourse the Golden Rule was certainly applicable as well. He who has the Gold, Rules.

Answer 2

Land claims and homesteads:
From The Significance of the Frontier, 1893
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom-these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.
But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa [Latin for "a need or opportunity to start from the beginning"]. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
—By Professor Frederick Jackson Turner

Answer 3

My great-grandfather Stephen Beane Stinson traveled from New Hampshire with his church group to Illinois in 1850. The church group had sailed from England earlier in 1792, where they had been under the protection of the Earl of Sandwich. On arriving in Illinois and finding good farm land there, they settled and named the town Sandwich.

Answer 4

By having the most money, and being rude, nasty, and just plain mean, haven't you watched any western movies?