I live in NC and in every country there seems to be four or five places at least with names like Devil's Playground, Devils Peak, Devil's what ever. And i was just wondering why a bunch of superstitious settlers would name a place after the devil. Was it just a devil to get there (we could weaponize the briars around here), was it because they saw something they couldn't explain (most places do have their spooky myths to go with the names) or what was it that they would name it after the prince of darkness instead of basically anything else.
The sub you're looking for is our sister sub, /r/AskAnthropology :) While you may get answers here, definitely x-post there
At least some of those places got the name "devil" attached to them via the white settlers misunderstanding a translation or calque of a Native American name that refers to some kind of spirit or animus.
A good example of this is Devil's Lake in North Dakota, where the well-documented Lakota name is Ble Waka Sica, which has been translated roughly as "Lake of the Spirits".
A similar case appears in Wisconsin, where there is also a "Devil's Lake", called Da-wa-kah-char-gra by the local Ho-Chunk Winnebago, who still use the site for seasonal celebrations.
So at least in the Upper Midwest, there seems to have been a trend for the Christian whites to interperate and native name that referred to "spirits" as somehow being equivalent to "devil" in their own religious framework, presumably on the idea that any spirit-being that wasn't explicitly an agent of the Christian god was somehow evil.
Sources:
Gannett, Henry. The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905.
Williams, Mary A. B. Origins of North Dakota Place Names. Washburn, N.D.: Bismarck tribune, 1966.