On September 25, Taylor Swift released four new songs on the expanded edition of her latest album, and one of them is called Babylon. Within days, the inevitable Long Island question was circulating, in group chats, on local feeds, and eventually in the national press, where historians were being asked to weigh in: is the biggest pop star on earth singing about the place with the Dunkin on Deer Park Avenue?

The short answer is almost certainly no. The song, co-written with her longtime collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, reaches for the ancient Babylon, the one with the legendary hanging gardens, and uses it the way songwriters have always used that name, as shorthand for a gilded world that cannot last.

But here is the thing Long Islanders can hold over every other listener. The town of Babylon is named for exactly the same place, and the story of how that happened is better than anything in the liner notes.

It started with a mother who did not approve

In 1803, a man named Nathaniel Conklin, son of Colonel Platt Conklin, moved his family from Dix Hills down to the mostly undeveloped south shore of what was then simply the southern reach of Huntington Town. The area had a name already: Sumpwams, a Native American term believed to describe an upright or just person, a straight walker. It also had something else, a cluster of taverns and inns serving the travelers moving along the south shore.

Nathaniel's mother, Phebe Conklin, was a religious woman, and she had heard the stories about the settlement her son had chosen. When she learned the new family home would stand next to a tavern, she declared the place another Babylon, and she did not mean it kindly. She meant the Babylon of the Bible, the byword for wickedness and excess, the city good people are warned about.

What happened next is the part worth retelling at dinner. Nathaniel did not argue with his mother, and he did not quietly drop the matter. He took the insult and carved it in stone. Into his new home he set a tablet reading New Babylon, built by Nat Conklin, 1803. The jab became the name, and the name stuck. By 1830 it was official: the federal government renamed the local post office from Huntington South to Babylon.

Which means the town's name is, at its root, a 223-year-old act of embracing the hate. Swift, of all people, would appreciate the move.

The stone is still here

This is not a story you have to take on faith, because the physical evidence survived. The Conklin house was moved in 1871 from its original spot near Main Street to what is now 280 Deer Park Avenue in Babylon Village. The Village bought the house in 1989, began restoring it in 1990, and operates it today as a historic house museum, with the house, gardens and barn open to the public. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the New Babylon inscription remains on display, a two-century-old receipt for the best comeback in Long Island naming history.

So if the song has put the word Babylon in your head on a loop this week, there is a free, genuinely charming field trip hiding in it. The museum sits right on Deer Park Avenue, a few minutes from the village Main Street, and the drive down is the same route Nathaniel's neighbors once took past those scandalous taverns.

Two Babylons, one source

There is a neat symmetry in all of it. The ancient city gave its name to a pop song about a shining world slipping away, and it gave its name to a South Shore town because one woman thought a tavern was a sign of exactly that kind of world. Both namings are about the same fear, that the good life curdles. The difference is what happened after. The song's Babylon falls. The real one incorporated, built a Main Street worth an afternoon, raised generations along the Great South Bay, and kept the stone that started it all.

The town has worn an insult as its name for more than two centuries and made it sound like home. So when the track comes up on shuffle somewhere on the Southern State, Long Islanders get to hear something nobody else in the stadium can: not a myth about a doomed city, but the punchline to a family argument from 1803 that a whole town decided to keep.