James Simek asked what is the correct name for the town that hosted The Dover Plains National Bank, New York, charter 822. Cataloguers and grading companies list it both as Dover and Dover Plains, and Louis Van Belkum used Dover Plains in his data compilations.
Situations like this are particularly common in New York, Pennsylvania and the New England states. The problem is that ambiguity quickly arises about what constitutes a town in those states. The legal definition of a town in the northeastern states differs from what people perceive a town to be elsewhere.
New York is subdivided into counties. Counties are overlain by “towns,” legally defined as sprawling interlocked areas that in some cases even spill across county