American Language Supplement 2 (112 page)

The classical place-names which engaud the map of central New York,
e.g., Troy, Utica, Ithaca
and
Syracuse
, have often been credited to Simeon DeWitt, surveyor-general of the State from 1784 to 1834, who laid out the bounty lands for Revolutionary soldiers on which they occur. But he denied in his old age that he had anything to do with the matter
¹
and hinted that they were actually chosen by the Commissioners of the Land Office, to wit, Governor George Clinton, Lewis A. Scott, Gerard Bancker and Peter T. Curtenius. This was at a meeting held in New York City on July 3, 1790,
²
at which DeWitt was not present. There remains, however, some mystery about the business, for the names bestowed at that meeting, though they included many personal names,
e.g., Brutus, Cicero, Romulus
and
Pompey
, did
not
include such place-names as
Troy, Utica
and
Syracuse
. Whatever the actual provenance of the latter and in spite of the ridicule which the wits of the time heaped upon them,
³
they appealed to the American imagination, and were presently imitated upon a large scale in the new West. So late as 1929 Evan T. Sage reported
⁴
that there were still 2200 on the American map, including 31
Troys
, 22
Athenses
, 20
Spartas
, 19
Carthages
and 13
Uticas
, and that they were to be found in every one of the 48 States.
⁵

There were similar wholesale bestowals of place-names in later years, especially after the railroads began to run everywhere. When the Southern Pacific was opened from Mojave, Calif., to the Colorado river “an alphabetical order was used –
Bristol, Cadiz, Daggett
, etc.”
¹
It was not uncommon, indeed, for the guests of the first train over a new line to be given the privilege of naming the stations along the way – most of them, of course, mere knots in the telegraph wire at that stage, but some of them substantial towns in the days following.
²
The Postoffice was also active in naming new communities, sometimes by deciding between rival contenders and at other times by inventing names of its own, and the Geological Survey and later the Forest Service commonly determined the names of newly-surveyed lakes, streams, mountains and valleys.
³
Washington Irving, in 1839,
⁴
charged that “the persons employed by government to survey and lay out townships” in his day were largely responsible for the embalming of politicians’ cognomens as place-names. “Well for us is it,” he said, “when these official great men happen to have names of fair acceptation, but woe unto us should a
Tubbs
or
Potts
be in power, for we are sure, in a little while, to find
Tubbsvilles
and
Pottsylvanias
springing up in every direction.” But most such names, of course, were invented and bestowed by Tubbses or Pottses who happened to have land in the vicinity, or by their local admirers or parasites. In 1837 a writer in the New York
Mirror
suggested that eponymous names might be made measurably more bearable by varying their suffixes. He said:

This proposal, which was apparently made quite seriously, seems to have had no immediate effect, but in the long run it may have launched the spate of
Ferndales, Stoneleighs, Woodmeres, Briarcliffes, Elmhursts
and the like which began to afflict the country after the Civil War.
³
The craze for such fancy names has survived into our own time, but of late it has shown some signs of abating. During the high tide of the great movement into the West, between the end of the War of 1812 and the first battle of Bull Run, it raged only among a small minority of aesthetes, chiefly clotted along the Atlantic Coast. The hearty Philistines who swarmed over the Alleghenies and then over the Rockies were quite innocent of it. In the main they were content to give their new settlements names brought from the East or fashioned of familiar materials and in time-worn patterns; for the rest, they preferred humor to poetry. This was the period which saw the founding of such surrealist communities as
Hot Coffee
, Miss.;
⁴
Hog Eye, Gourd Neck, Black Ankle, Lick Skillet
and
Nip and Tuck
, Texas;
⁵
Social Circle
, Ga.;
Sleepy Eye
, Minn.;
Gizzard
, Tenn.;
Noodle
, Texas;
Wham
and
Waterproof
, La.;
Oblong
, Ill.;
⁶
Peculiar
, Mo.;
⁷
Santa Claus
, Ind.;
⁸
Wages
, Colo.;
Drain
, Ore.;
Goodnight
, Texas;
Ox
, Ohio;
Okay
, Okla.;
Grit
, Ky.;
Loco
, Okla.;
Plush
, Ore.;
¹
Rabbit Hash
, Ky.;
Bug
, Ky.;
Bumble Bee
, Ariz.;
Blue Eye
, Mo.;
Fireworks
, Ill.;
Huzzah
, Mo.;
Ice
, Ky.;
Jitney
, Mont.;
Only
, Tenn.;
Rat
, Mo.;
Razor
, Texas;
What Cheer
, Iowa;
Wink
, Texas;
Zigzag
, Ore.;
²
Bowlegs
, Okla.;
Bugtussle
, Texas;
³
Braggadocia
, Mo.;
Big Arm
, Mont., and
Defeated
, Tenn.

The popularity of such grotesque names in the new West seems to have been first noted by James Hall (1793–1868), a Philadelphian who went down the Ohio by keelboat in 1820, settled on what was then the frontier, became a judge in Illinois, and finally engaged in banking at Cincinnati. In 1828 he published a book in which he described the new country, and in it he printed a jingle recording some of its curious nomenclature,
e.g., Horsetail, Dead Man, Custard, Brindle
and
Raccoon
.
⁴
But it was after the plains and Rockies were crossed that the pioneers really spit on their hands and showed what they could do. Many of their inventions have become part of the romantic tradition of the Pacific Coast and have thus taken on a kind of improbability, but
Humbug Flat, Jackass Gulch, Gouge Eye, Red Dog, Lousy Level, Gomorrah
,
⁵
Shirt Tail
and
Hangtown
were very real
⁶
and so late as 1876
Henry T. Williams was printing a long list which included
Ragtown, Dead Mule, Chucklehead, One Eye, Puke, Rat-Trap, Port Wine, Ground Hog’s Glory, Nigger Hill, Blue Belly, Swellhead, Centipede, Seven-by-Nine, Gospel Swamp, Nary Red, Gas Hill, Paint Pot, Pancake, Chicken Thief, Hog’s Diggings, Shinbone, Poodletown, Puppytown, Git-Up-and-Git
and
Poverty Hill
.
¹
In the years since then many of these names have been changed to more elegant ones,
²
and others have vanished with the ghost towns they adorned, but not a few still hang on. Indeed, there are plenty of lovely specimens to match them in the East, in regions that were also frontier in their days,
e.g
., the famous cluster in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania:
Bird in Hand, Bareville, Blue Ball, Mt. Joy, Intercourse
and
Paradise
.
³
Pennsylvania also has towns named
Cyclone, Cypher, High Dry, Holiday, Local
and
Obelisk
, and I have heard of one named
Poison
, though it is not on the maps.
Hog Island
, Pa., which got into the newspapers often during World War I, had namesakes in Virginia, Texas, Maine, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. Maryland has a
Blue Ball
to match Pennsylvania’s, and also a
Basket
, a
Bald Friar
, a
Fiery Siding
, an
Issue
, a
Number Nine
, a
Gott
and a
T.B
. New Jersey has a
Dolphin
, a
Seaboard
, a
Straws
and a
Wall
.

This writer, alas, was too optimistic, for the law turned out to be as unenforceable as the Volstead Act, and at the present moment Michigan has a
London
, a
Paris
, a
Palmyra
, a
Troy
, an
Athens
, a
Sparta
, a
Moscow
, a
Franklin
and a
Washington
, to say nothing of a
Rome
, a
Dublin
, an
Oxford
, a
Turin
, a
Sans Souci
, a
Topaz
, a
Payment
, an
Eden
, a
Zion
and a
Dice
. It was not, in fact, until more than half a century afterward, on February 15, 1890, that any effective effort was undertaken to bring place-names under official regulation. On that day Captain H. F. Picking, the hydrographer of the Navy, set up a board in his office to consult with the hydrographers of foreign nations about the forms and spellings of names appearing on mariners’ charts. The British Admiralty had published rules of its own in 1885, and Captain Picking’s board was soon in communication with the Admiralty authorities, and with those of France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Mexico, Japan and China. The result was a report published by the Navy Department in 1891.
¹
It dealt wholly with foreign place-names, but its preparation naturally suggested the need of a similar study and control of American names, and on September 4, 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed a United States Board on Geographic Names consisting of representatives of the Postoffice, the Smithsonian, the Hydrographic Office of the Navy, the Engineer Corps of the Army, the Lighthouse Board, the State Department, the Geological Survey, and the Coast and Geodetic Survey. The authority of this board, at the start, was confined to settling disputes regarding place-names which arose in the departments,
but on January 23, 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt widened its scope by charging it with “the duty of determining, changing and fixing” all such names “within the United States and insular possessions,” and a little later its name was shortened to United States Geographic Board. Representatives of the General Land Office, the Government Printing Office, the Census Bureau, the Biological Survey and other agencies were added to it from time to time, and it continued to flourish until 1934. It issued frequent announcements of its decisions, and in 1933 published an 834-page report in which all of those reached down to 1932 were assembled.

Unfortunately, it was treated parsimoniously by an otherwise lavish government. Down to 1917 it had no appropriation of its own, but fed its members out of the salaries they got from the various departments, and down to 1929 it had no paid secretary.
¹
On April 17, 1934, as an incident of the departmental reorganization then in progress, it was abolished, its functions were transferred to the Interior Department, and it there reappeared as the United States Board on Geographical Names. For some time it seems to have escaped the notice of the idealists then fashioning a new world, and so late as 1935 its staff was confined to an executive secretary, an assistant and a clerk. But then its potentialities were grasped by the forward-looking Secretary of the Interior, the Hon. Harold L. Ickes, and after Pearl Harbor it began to move into high gear. On February 25, 1943, it was reorganized with a director at $8,000 a year, an assistant at $5,000, two grand divisions of five sections each, a staff of geographers and philologians, and a working force of 110 altogether.
²
During the war years it naturally gave most of its attention to foreign place-names, for the Army and Navy were then penetrating to many far places, and where even the Army and Navy could not go airships were carrying agents soliciting clients for Lend Lease. Thus the board, in July, 1945, brought out a brochure on Tibet by which it appeared that the proper spelling of the name of the Tibetan village lying at the intersection of Lat. 27° 30’N and Long. 85° 14’E was
Mendong Gomba
, not
Mendong Gompa
, and that to call it
Men-tung-Ssu
was altogether incorrect. Other brochures dealt with the place-names of Mongolia, Portuguese Timor and the Lesser Sunda islands, but those of the United States were rather neglected, and nearly all of the few dealt with were the names of mountains, rivers, etc., not of inhabited places.