Iowa does look like the usual air head blond who is good for nothing but tits and butts after all. Her ingame speech doesn't help either...
Always got the impression that what she lacks in formal education and mannerisms she more than makes up for in experience and charisma. In essence, she would be the perfect saleswoman or even bigwig.
It's more that when people immigrated, they named new towns after wherever the founders were from. Hence, there's a lot of British names in the earliest parts of Virginia or "New England", German town names in Pennsylvania, etc. Depending on who filled up some leftover space when, you might see an Oslo right next to a New Prague.
Incidentally, "Springfield" is such a popular name (one in 34 states) because colonists moved into native villages that were abandoned after the plague had wiped the villages out after planting season, so the colonists could take advantage of the crops just 'springing out of the fields' (which had already been plowed for them).
