Where is Hyattsville? It seems like a simple question, but it turns out that there are conflicting answers — and a long-ago decision can explain why.

If you started at Franklins in downtown Hyattsville and drove up Route 1, you’ll be in Riverdale Park.

Keep driving north, turn onto East-West Highway and keep heading east past the Baltimore-Washington Parkway for 15 minutes into Lanham and your GPS may tell you that you’re back in Hyattsville.

In reality, you aren’t. But the U.S. Postal Service considers a number of addresses in the area to be Hyattsville — one reason why stories in the Washington Post and elsewhere will refer to places nowhere near Hyattsville by that name.

As College Park geography student D.W. Rowlands recently explained, the confusion started in 1953, when residents of the area around Lanham incorporated as a city they called Carrollton, a Maryland resident who signed the Declaration of Independence.

The problem? There were already another community in Carroll County called Carrollton.

To avoid sending mail to the wrong place, the Postal Service required mail for the Prince George’s County Carrollton be addressed to Hyattsville. Even after residents voted in 1966 to change the name to New Carrollton, the practice persisted, creating two Hyattsvilles:

The western of these two regions that the Post Office considers Hyattsville contains the City of Hyattsville and unincorporated areas to its west and north. The eastern one, though, contains none of Hyattsville, and is made up of two ZIP codes (20784 and 20785) that include the incorporated municipalities of Landover Hills and Cheverly and New Carrollton.