A Pennsylvania state lawmaker is calling on President Trump to rename Lake Erie to “Lake Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania state Rep. David Maloney, a Republican, is preparing a resolution “urging the President of the United States, Congress, and the United States Secretary of the Interior to take the necessary steps to rename Lake Erie as ‘Lake Pennsylvania,'” a statement read.

“The case is about the lake’s modern identity,” the statement read.

Fox News shared further:

Lake Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes by volume as well as the shallowest, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The lake has about 12 million people in its watershed, with 10.5 million people in the U.S. and 1.9 million people in Canada.

This comes after Trump signed an executive order last month to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” a rebranding that Canada does not recognize and has firmly rejected.

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“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement.

The renaming only applies to the U.S. federal government, meaning Canada, other international bodies and U.S. states are not forced to acknowledge the change. But both Apple Maps and Google Maps changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for U.S. users following Trump’s executive order.

“Every summer, Pennsylvanians head toward the lake—north on I-79 from western Pennsylvania, west on I-80 from central and eastern Pennsylvania and along connecting highways from every corner of the Commonwealth—with boats, fishing gear and families in tow,” Maloney said.

“This is Pennsylvania’s only Great Lake. Its modern economy and identity are increasingly tied to the boaters, anglers, families and tourists who come to enjoy it,” Maloney continued.

“Ohio has plenty of shoreline. New York already has two Great Lakes. Canada has four others,” he added.

“Pennsylvania has one. Let’s call it Lake Pennsylvania!” Maloney concluded his statement.

“Pennsylvania also punches well above its weight in maintaining our Great Lake’s recreational fishery. Despite having a relatively small share of the lake’s shoreline, Pennsylvania stocked nearly 500,000 yearling steelhead in 2025—approximately 40% of all steelhead stocked and more than any other state or Canadian province. Pennsylvania also supplied all the brown trout stocked into the lake that year,” Maloney wrote on X.

CBC has more:

Ken Drouillard is a University of Windsor professor who teaches a course on the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

He says renaming places with strong historical significance, such as the Great Lakes, serves to break those connections.

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“We ultimately become poorer for this loss,” he told CBC News.

“Names are more than just labels on a map, they connect us to place and history,” added Drouillard, who’s also with the university’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER).

He says similar to Lake Ontario, Lake Erie’s name has its roots in First Nation naming conventions that predates both the U.S. and Canada.

“Beyond this, renaming Lake Erie undermines the rich historical context that Lake Erie has played, particularly in the early westward migration and settlement of the U.S. Midwest.”

“The Lake Erie Canal was the first major inter-basin diversion connecting Lake Erie to the Hudson River and the New York City Port on the Atlantic Ocean. Would renaming Lake Erie necessitate renaming this historical canal entirely enclosed in a different state?”

The name Erie is a short form of the Indigenous word erielhonan, which translates to “long tail.”

 

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