Oh my god, I knew that old metalleus joke about deriving moses from middletown was old, since I'd first heard of it through usenet, ferchrissakes, but apparently something about the moses-middletown pair goes really far back in the history of linguistics/philology. Here's a book (alluded to in this article about children's counting rhymes) by Henry Carrington Bolton from 1888 that mentions it: https://archive.org/stream/countingoutrhyme00bolt#page/50/mode/2up (top of page 51)