Something I've learned about naming things is that names for places tend to describe one of three things:
- a geographic feature
- important people or groups in local history
- a product the area is known for
The trick to making names is to start with one of those three and work your way out. What struggles did those people encounter? What is the geography? What's unique about the area to allow different products to be made?
Everything is all interconnected so much that it can be hard to know where to start laying the first cord in the tangle. Truly, laying the cord down somewhere and starting from there is probably for the best. It doesn't matter where, just somewhere and then let the rest of the complexity unravel.
Things don't have to have universal truths seeping out from every corner. History is made out of people, actions people take and the world they find themselves in. Work around it. Envision the end and the beginning, then a way that the end could come from it.
A bit of surrealism helps spice things up, nonfiction tends to not make sense, but fiction sure has to. How would the nonfiction of a place influence its stories?