Bi-Weekly Topic for Oct 15, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060116044555/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?PlaceNames
Place/Name
By P.
A place’s name is not the place itself, but it can be a snapshot of its history, if it’s old enough to have one — and I’m not unaware of how peculiarly American it must seem to others, to have “places” too young to have a history.
The standard local history of my hometown maintains that after a church was burnt down by a carpenter who wasn’t paid for his work, the town fathers were so embarrassed that they renamed the place in honor of a War of 1812 naval hero. The hero’s subsequent career didn’t add much to the village’s luster, but the name remains, pinning the town to the early 19th century.
Around it is a welter of places named for home by the ex-New Englanders who settled the region: Sherburne, Mt. Upton, Afton, Coventry and places with names borrowed from a vague understanding of Indian languages, like Otsego, Otego, Otsdawa, Chenango and Susquehanna.
When the interior of New York opened up after the Revolution, the state parceled out names as fast as Adam must have and the tracts given as pay to Continental Army soldiers drew a library of names from classical literature, then very much in fashion: Syracuse, Manilius (now Manlius), Clay, Cicero, Pompey, Apulia and many more. D.G. Rossiter of Ithaca posits that the names came from John Dryden's translation of Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans." Whatever -- The stately architecture of the region’s oldest buildings echoes the theme.
Among my favorite origin stories, though, is that of Delhi, a county seat in the northern Catskills: When the time came to give the narrow valley and the township around it a name in 1802, politicians thought to honor Judge Ebenezer Foote, a landowner and state senator known as “the great mogul” to his buddies — for wealth, but also because he was short and fat. They offered “Delhi,” it being the Indian potentate’s home.
Proponents of “Mapleton” grouched about the choice, and Erastus Root, a fellow politican who eventually became lieutenant governor (he was buried in Delhi for a while), quipped: “Dell-high, hell-high — better call it Foote-high!”
The maple lovers got Maple Grove on the East branch of the Delaware River, but Delhi became the county seat — graced by a lovely, warm-brick French Empire courthouse and the ample homes of well-to-do 19th-century lawyers — while Maple Grove remains only in the bitter memories of onetime residents; it was lost under the Pepacton reservoir.
Now, you should take origin stories with a grain of salt. They’re no more provable than Homer’s (another Upstate New York placename) tale of the Trojan Horse, but they’re just as important to the town’s identity, and you question them at your peril.
The names that ring my bells, however, are the ones that don’t go with “official” places. “Camel’s Hump” is the humplike pasture, now gone to scrub woods, that projects into a curve of the Susquehanna near my hometown; five miles east, Jackass Mountain Road climbs the same ridge, leaving you to wonder what pioneers thought that animal looked like. “Frasers” was a whistle stop and a creamery on a long-defunct rail line near Delhi. “Yaleville” is the ambitious name of a trio of houses along a country road near my hometown.
Near Delhi, “Meridale” boasts a post office at the foot of the long-defunct Catskill Turnpike, which once led settlers from the Hudson River deep into the forests of western New York. Someday, someone will explain to me where “the Barkaboom,” a track leading to fishermen’s camps near the Pepaction Reservoir, came from.
I think that back when a five-mile ride in the wagon was an all-morning expedition, little places mattered more. When you got to Coopers Corners after an hour of hot plodding up from the river valley to the south, you knew that you were almost to Yaleville and your long, 300-foot climb was almost done. Now it's just a couple of houses before the turnoff to the road that goes past the old dump, and you haven't accomplished anything because you've got much farther to go.
None of the places I think of as old are old by European standards. But, disused now, they still hint of the lives and loves of people a lot like me, and the names they bear still speak of hard work and hope, and they never fail to stir a response in my own soul.
Source: http://my.core.com/%7Epzicari/text/Placenames.html?
You can't get there from here
By One Pot Meal
Written for Ecotone: Place Names
In the town where I grew up, the one I call Salthill when I write fiction (a name with its own story, you betcha), you can tell how long someones lived there by what they call things. Theres a section of town called Egypt, parallel streets of near-identical houses and near-identical lives, streets named Cairo Circle and Kings Way and Delta Lane. On the edge of that neighborhood is a small old single-story building wedged into a junction where five roads cross. According to the sign, its the Egypt Country Store.
But if youve been around a while its the Postie, because in addition to those five roads theres an old railbed that crosses there, too, and the whats now a store was once a post office, sacks of letters coming and going daily. Maybe on those hooks Ive always enjoyed in model trains but never seen used in life—a bag of mail hangs outside the building and the train grabs it in passing, never stopping, sometimes hanging out its own bag for the station master to grab on their own hook. Ive wondered, once or twice, about people who spend entire lives seeing the same faces everyday but never meeting for real—waving to the conductor as the train rattles by without ever learning his name.
We live in places that way, spending our snatch of months or years on the surface of a town, the first generation of our family to live there and knowing all along that it isnt forever. We learn the names we’re surrounded by, but not always the ones they replaced (and I’m not even going back far enough to consider that the town’s name itself is a misappropriation of a Wampanoag word). In my case, we moved to Salthill when I was ten, and I left when I was eighteen, and Ive visited but havent lived there since, and, knock on wood, wont ever again. When I think of the century of investment the family has in my current neighborhood, in my current city, twenty years of a single generation hardly seems worth mentioning, but I mention it anyway, more often than not.
When I mention the Egypt Country Store Ill call it the Postie, but I never knew it for anything but groceries; the train pulled up years before I arrived. A whole other set of names probably went with it.
On the east side of town, only a couple of miles from the Postie, theres another store called Dads or Pops or something like that. In high school it was called something else, something that came and went so fast Ive forgotten, and earlier it was Sams Variety, but I always only called it Bishops because thats the name I learned from older kids, kids whod been in town longer, and remembered when it actually was Bishops. If Id told one of my neighbors I was going to Bishops, theyd have known exactly where I was headed, though the name was long gone, but now its buried under so many other names that Im not sure how far Id get.
Outside Bishops once I opened a package of some confection that came and went, cookie sticks and a tub of chocolate sauce like those crackers and cheese with red plastic sticks. You were supposed to dip the cookie in the chocolate and eat it, but instead I dipped them and hurled the dripping missiles at the hair of a girl my age, who I probably had a crush on but truly now cant remember. She shrieked, and she ran, and I chased but never got any closer than hurling cookies before she moved, after high school, becoming an actress on some TV show you may have heard of and changing her name to something you wouldnt recognize if youd grown up with her.
Closer to my house, the store was named after a local family that owned a few of them and competed with another local family who owned even more small convenience stores, sometimes buying each other out. The first chain is gone now, the second is huge, and if I stood outside that store down the street from my parents and told people coming and going that the son of the owner, the namesake of the store, once accused me of stealing and made me open my inevitable black trench coat (it didnt mean a thing, at the time) to show him I wasnt, or that my brother once epoxied the lock of his car door in revenge for something or other… if I told them all that theyd ask, Who? and Where was this, now? Ive never heard of that place? or they might not use exactly those words but Id know what they meant.
Farther away, at the north end of town, is a store that was called Curtis Compact when I arrived, and I still call it that, though later it was bought by that bigger chain I mentioned and had been something else earlier and may be something else again, now. In the middle of the night, when I could first drive, I went there for pints of Ben and Jerrys and soda, the only 24-hour business in town so the only excuse to get out of the house and come home past the beach and park by the lighthouse to watch the lamp go around and around, blocked on the seaward side in those days of decommission so it only cast light across land and went dark when it came to the water.
Reading over, now, what Ive just written, I notice that my life for a time was framed by these four convenience stores like the points of a compass, but that since then, after moving away and building my life elsewhere, its come to be framed more by their names instead: who I am when I visit is a person who calls businesses what they once were, who got lost a few weeks ago driving to the house he grew up in because woods have turned into streets and what was once navigation by the absence of landmarks—a fork with trees in the middle, a street without a sign—is now a jumble of mansions in developments with big signs facing the streets to announce names Ive never heard.
I listened to some old timers complain once in the restaurant where I worked through high school about how the town had gotten uppity in their youth, changing all the street names that didnt appeal to the new class of people moving south out of Boston with money and aspirations and schemes. Goose Turd Lane became Elm Street, and I could give more examples but none would mean so much next to that. At the time, I just thought it was funny, but now Im picturing a map in their grizzled grey heads with Goose Turd Lane at the center of town, and another map where you head past the Postie going east if you want to get to Bishops, and it doesnt seem funny at all that the names on either of those maps would get me hopelessly lost on the road.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040307104433/www.onepotmeal.com/2003/10/index.html
Place Names
The biweekly topic at the Ecotone for October 15 is Place Names. Got any interesting place names near you or place name stories you'd be willing to share? You can leave them as comments here if I can't talk you into contributing to the Ecotone.
My wife thinks it odd that if I can find an old road map under the seat of the car somewhere, I can amuse myself for a half hour while she is in the fabric store. And this is a fact, I admit. It doesn't matter how old or of where; a map contains a hundred stories in the names that places have been given, and the imagination is free to ponder and concoct. While there may be the kernel of a fact wrapped up in the names of villages, mountains, crossroads and rivers, more often than not, the names make me wonder about the part of the story that they don't tell.
Just glancing at the map of southwest Virginia now, for instance... over there is Barren Springs. I bet there's a story in the name. Maybe it wasn't the springs that were barren. Perhaps it was thought at one time that the water contained a poison that would result in stillborn children. Hmmmm. And over a county or two is Porter's Crossroads-- like many names, commemorative for an unknown (most likely Mr.) Porter. Some once-significant roads intersected there, and so it became a center of commerce. Maybe it was just a farming community, but possibly it nurtured an early industry related to the lead mines that made shot for the Confederate Army. And obviously this was a former glory as PC now lies now in the middle of nowhere. Shooting Creek, right here in Floyd County, was the scene of a fierce battle between the moonshiners and the revenuers come to bust up their moonshine stills, if I'm remembering my tales right, and I would have imagined just such a history from seeing the name on a county map. Boone's Mill; Haymakertown; Yellow Sulfur Springs... all tell of a central enterprise that once happened in those places with enough regularity or importance that the little settlements got labeled by them.
Other names are more geographic, like Five Mile Mountain that meanders down the Blue Ridge towards Ferrum; Bent Mountain that plunges zigzagging off the same geology toward Roanoke; and Buffalo Mountain, so named not because the creatures used to live there but because the outline of the 4000 foot tall monadnock looks in outline like a resting buffalo. It is the most outstanding single physical feature of the county and the high school teams take their names from it.
Place names can be mystifying. You wonder what the town fathers were thinking when they came up with the name Breeding Ranch over in a nearby county, until you understand it was named after a Mr. Breeding and does not promote promiscuity in any way, as your mind might at first have imagined. What you can't tell from looking at map names is that town names often take on their own local pronunciation. Wytheville, where we lived for 12 years, was widely pronounced Whiffle; the nearby sleepy village of Rural Retreat (the home of Dr. Pepper) had way too many "R"s to get your teeth around, and it was called simply "Earl Treat". One was thought affected if they enunciated the third syllable of Fort Chiswell, and instead it was often simply Fort Chissel. Nearer to Floyd, Staunton is Stanton, Buena Vista is Byou-na Vista, Meadows of Dan (near the headwaters of the Dan River) is MedduzzaDan...all one word. You know you got yourself a tourist if they pronounce the "of".
When we first moved from Alabama to Virginia long ago, I was a little ruffled to find that so many of the counties in the "commonwealth" (Virginia is technically NOT a state, you see) were high-falluting names of colonial royalty: Prince William, Prince George, Prince Edward, King and Queen, King George Counties. I imagined powdered wigs and lacey collars and poofy cuffs on all the local farmers in those counties. Where I had come from we were less pretentious, more earthy and yet also recognizing of our roots: Lochapoka, Notasulga, Saugahatchee, Euphapee, Chewalkla, Sylacauga, Coosa, Tallapoosa were little Alabama towns or creeks near Auburn where I first started enjoying maps and map names. They were the multisyllabic names the Cherokee and Choctaw (two Alabama County names, by the way) had given to those places; although how they knew one place from another without these convenient municipality lines and county seats layed out nice and neat on the map is a mystery to me.
So. Next time you get stranded in an interstate motel room with nothing to read but Gideons Bible and the Rand-McNally Atlas, after you've read a selection from the Psalms and one from the gospels ('cause this is as close as some of ya blamed heatherns are gonna get to going to church)-- head straight for the atlas pages that show Idaho, Minnesota and Vermont. Find the three most intriguing place names on each; amuse yourself by making up stories to explain each name. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to nestle down under those stiff, smoky sheets and listen til morning to the ice machine and the biker dudes in the room next door.
Comments
Great post, buddy! I always liked the way the folks in Buchanan and Buckhannon both call home with the same pronunciation.
What is the story behind Rural Retreat being the home of Dr Pepper? I would like to hear more about that. I always heard that it started out at a drugstore in Waco Texas.
Hey, now! I'm from King George!
Is the fabric store where Mrs. Fred shops Schoolhouse Fabrics? I loved that place. Autumn in southwest Virginia.
This is true where I come from too, feste...most people who aren't from Toronto think that the city is pronouced "TRAW-na" by locals. The truth is that locals pronounce it "To-RON-o" and anyone who pronounces is "TRAW-na" is probably from 'Frisco.
Dig?
Our Toronto, NSW, is pronounced by the locals as
To-RON-o also. I'm struck by the similarities in our respective countries' histories - our place names have a similar theme to yours.
Frisco is only marginally worse than San Fran, which is what airline employees and travel agents call it when they're trying to book you a flight there given that your last one got cancelled on account of the fog...
Well that was a good read. Nearly as good as reading a map! Maps are like books where at times you want to read between the lines and try to work out as you say "about the part of the story that they don't tell."
It's "Chewalcla"
I dont know but Porter's Crossroads might be related to Porter's mill, which was owned by Porter Jessup and is up around that way on the Dan River.
I enjoyed your blog because I had lived away from the area for a number of years and realized that some of the words we used in sw va were not as spelled. You left out Buchanan (pronounced Buck-Hanan)You may also wish to note that a stranger may be tested of his southern roots by being asked the name of General Lee's horse (Traveler). Just some thoughts, Cline
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
By Cassandra Pages
This is a contribution to the ECOTONE Topic for today, "Place Names".
Odysseus lashed to the mast while tempted by the Sirens (on a red-figure vase in the British Museum)
PLACE NAMES
Listening with rapt attention to my mother reading a child’s version of The Iliad and The Odyssey, I couldn’t have predicted that the nine-year-old girl I was then would grow up to study classics – or, for that matter, give a “virtual place” someday the name The Cassandra Pages. Place names are supposed to tell us something about history, but how often does our own history get caught up in theirs? In my case I think it did, to some extent, giving me a tacit permission to do something out-of-the-ordinary with my life, and to identify with a history that went even further back than the colonial and Indian names that also made up the map of my childhood world.
It’s impossible to ignore the native American legacy in central New York. The beautiful Iroquois names that trip musically off the tongues of local people and confound newcomers -- Susquehanna, Chenango, Unadilla, Chittenango, Canasawacta, Oswego, Sacandaga, Canajoharie, Skaneateles (give up? you say “skinny-AT-las”) – are just one part of a local culture that has never moved very far away from woodsman lore and craft, hunting and fishing for food more than sport, and interest in early history, artifacts, and antiques.
The Dutch colonists gave their own names to the early settlements in the Albany region (Rensselaer, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Watervliet), but as you move west in the state, they give way to British place names brought by settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut who were moving westward (Hartford, Norwich, Oxford) and names that commemorate famous American colonial figures (Hamilton, Madison, Herkimer). The area I grew up in was still “frontier” at the time of the American Revolution; in fact when I was in Cooperstown a few weeks ago I saw an exhibit commemorating the 225th anniversary of the infamous Cherry Valley Massacre. This 1778 raid by Indians on a frontier settlement occurred about 40 miles east of my hometown, which in turn wasn’t settled until 1792.
But in addition to the native, European, and early American place names that surrounded me as a child, there were the classical ones: Utica, Syracuse, Cicero, Ithaca, Marathon, Homer. (William R. Farrel has recently written a book called Classical Place Names in New York State: Origins, Histories and Meanings. I haven’t read it yet, but I know some of these names are traceable to Simeon Dewitt, who was Surveyor-General of the State of New York (ca. 1789) and owned of a good deal of land in the Syracuse/Ithaca area.)
The Homeric names my mother was reading to me rang a bell: they were words I’d already heard; towns I’d visited, and somehow that made the Greek stories not only alive and real, but made me a participant in them. I wonder now if that was a subtle influence on me, a little added permission granted by the gods for a bookish, country girl to feel connected to classical history and literature. Of course, my family’s bookshelf had more to do with it, as well as the fact that I had a great-aunt named Minerva -- but the weaving of Ariadne-like threads was never more apparent to me than the momentous day I first opened my copy of The Iliad in a university Greek class, in Ithaca, New York. They wrap me still: here in my office I can look up at a framed page from an early printed edition of The Odyssey -- or reach out my hand to hold an Iroquois axe-head, polished and black, that my grandfather dug up in our garden, on the floodplain of the Chenango River.
4:55 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_cassandrapages_archive.html#10662416720840320
Place Names
Ecotone
Ecotone has become a place on the internet. I don’t know what Ecotone means. I have read why the word was chosen but I can’t remember it. I don’t think I want to. It has its own meaning to me: a community of conversation, a group of people who don’t just write about place but care about place and the things that influence it. The current topic is Place Names and other people's entries can be found here.
Acorn 1075
Acorn was the old exchange for Acton until the late 1960’s. It was the first phone number I learnt. In the old Ealing films, you sometimes hear people answer the phone saying Acorn ****.
The West Riding
The West Riding is where I lived most of my childhood before and after Acton. In Those Days the county of Yorkshire was divided into three ridings: east, west and north. Apparently the village I live in now used to be just in the North Riding and the boundary was on the other bank of the canal where the West Riding began. The buses said West Yorkshire on them but people were very identified with the Riding in which they lived. By the time I was about eighteen, the Ridings had gone off the map altogether. It was a hugely emotive issue for people of Yorkshire and a purely administrative decision by central government. The area I lived in at the time became part of the new North Yorkshire County Council. As it happens, I am living in NYCC twenty eight years later. But there's a campaign locally to get our postal address and post codes back to saying North Yorkshire. For the last few years it has been West Yorkshire with a Bradford post code.
I applaud the people in Otley who took action against the sudden appearance of the Welcome to Leeds signs outside their town. Talk about bureaucratic insensitivity!
Appletreewick
Appletreewick was childhood heaven. And the thing is, it still exists. And it's still quite heavenly. Sometimes in summer we go for a peach beer in the garden of the New Inn. Now that's improved. When, in the nineteen seventies I took a partner camping in Appletreewick, we went to the New Inn and it was so depressing. The landlord read us a poem - an epic poem -about how his wife had died of cancer from smoking and made my partner by some strange means which involved holding some minty liquid in her mouth for the duration of his poem, give up smoking.
Anyway, I love the name Appletreewick and may be trying to say it when I die!
Posted by Coup de Vent at 11:31 AM | Comments (5)
Comments
Terrific pics and remarks on place names, CDV! Loved them.
Posted by beth at October 16, 2003 12:02 AMI can picture you on your deathbed, muttering "Appletreewick" and all the newspaper reporters heading out to scour the country for the meaning of it. A plot line worthy of an Orson Wells flick...!
Posted by Chris at October 16, 2003 07:41 AMGreat post. I think English place names are the best in the world!! For example : Great Snoring and Little Snoring in Norfolk.
Posted by Geoff at October 16, 2003 10:00 AMAs you probably know, the Ridings take their name from a Norse word - I think it was 'thridding' - which divided Yorkshire in thirds.
As for the dreaded Leeds Creep, Wetherby is also annoyed at being associated with it.
Names can be so misleading though can't they ? Not Appletreewick of course. The place lives up to its gorgeous appendage.
Over the Pennines in Manchester, we have a windy country lane (honest !) that runs between Oldahm and Manchester. Its modern name is the A62 but most locals know it as Manchester or Oldham Road - depending on where they live.
As you perambulate from Oldham down to Manchester you will pass through the deligtfully bucolic Hollinwood. Soon after the whimsical landscape of Newton Heath appears. A mere cock stride later and the magnificence of Collyhurst and Harpur Hey are at your beck and call. Within the half hour the rustic charms of the deligtful Miles Platting hove into view. Finally a short stop for refreshments in the hamlet of New Cross before the heady deligts of Manchester.
Hollinwood
Newton Heath
Collyhurst
Harpur Hey
Miles Platting
New Cross
Could all be villages in the Cotwolds couldn't they ?
Believe me - you wouldn't want to live in any of them !
You've got me hankering after Yorkshire in Autumn - I might suggest that Dearest and myself go for a drive in the next few weeks. It really is a wonderful part of the world. You and Paris are very lucky to live there.
Posted by Steve at October 18, 2003 02:09 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031023192204/http://www.airenet.co.uk/alife/2003_10.html
October 15, 2003
By Bowen Island Journal
When I first moved to Bowen Island, I wrote a piece on the place names of Howe Sound which stands up pretty well today as my contribution to the Ecotone Wiki's collective blogging about place names for today. From that original post, I wanted to reiterate something Robert Bringhurst wrote about the Squamish name for Bowen Island, "Xwlil Xhwm." Bringhurst referred to that name as "a stony protuberance of meaning cloaked in a forest of evergreen consonants" which of course perfectly captures the sense of the place here. "Bowen" was a British Navy captain who never saw this part of the world. "Xwlil Xhwm" is all about the creation of the earth, the transformation of humans and the origin of the black-tailed deer.
Lately, there has been a wonderful effort underway to write history back on the land. Julian and Kathy Dunster have been busy naming all of the creeks on Bowen. Julian is a forester and Kathy is a biologist who hand drew a four by six foot map of Bowen for the Islands of the Salish Sea mapping project. Together they have been covering every square inch of the island searching for watercourses, and naming the ones that haven't been named yet. All of this naming reflects the post-European settlement and character of the island. Among the names of the creeks, streams and rivers are a bunch that reflect the names of Bowen Islanders past and present, and then there are these whimsical ones:
- Bong Creek
- Bang Creek
- Drum Beat
- Purple Haze
- Kill Creek
- Whine Creek
- Stream of Consciousness
- Drinking Cougar
- Hanging Deer
- Om Creek
- Donny Brook
- Dharma Creek
- Dogma Creek
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_10_01_archive.html#106628528683886005
Place names - NSW
By Mulubinba Moments
This week we are discussing Place Names on the Ecotone Wiki (see side bar).
Australia’s place names come in four categories:- the Aboriginal place names, European place names, names describing a feature of the landscape (Redhead, Blue Mountains) and places named after Explorers, Bureacrats and Free Settlers. Some place names are simply unimaginative - we have for example a Macquarie St, a Macquarie Fields, a Macquarie River, a Lake Macquarie and a Port Macquarie - all named after Governor Macquarie naturally! One suburb boasts first second, third and fourth streets, another suburb has streets named after every wine known to man. We do however have our share of more interesting place names - try for example, Dunedoo, HumptyDo, Boggabilla, Boggabri, Woolloomooloo, Woy Woy and personal favourites of ours, Moolip and Mooball. The naming of our national capital, Canberra, could have been a disaster. A public call for suggestions elicited more than 700, including Kangaremu, Sydmeladperbrisho, Empire City, Democratia, Australamooloo, Utopia, Cooee, Swindleville, Gonebroke and Revenuelia. Sense prevailed, with the declaration in 1913 that the Aboriginal name given to the area since the 1850s would remain.
A closer look at our area reveals many interesting names - there is Toronto (named in honour of a Canadian sculler who settled there!): Wallsend, Gateshead, Greta, Abermain, Scone, Abernethy, Swansea - no prizes for guessing where a number of our first settlers came from. Our indigenous roots give us names like Wangi Wangi (place of the night owls); Boolaroo (place of many flies); Teralba (place of ticks); Booragul (summer or warm place)- much more descriptive and imaginative.
In my search for the meanings of some of our local place names I came across a small piece on the “imaginatively called” Lake Macquarie (after Governor Macquarie of course). This is the largest salt walter coastal lake in the Southern Hemisphere (four times the size of Sydney Harbour) and is only a 20 minute drive away from home. The lake’s foreshore consists of 174km of beaches, bays and headlands. From 1800 to 1826 however it had another name - “Reid’s Mistake”. Captain William Reid was the first European to make his way into the lake. Sent from Sydney to collect coal from the mouth of the Hunter River he mistook the channel entrance of the lake for the river estuary, ventured inside and encountered some members of the Awabakal tribe, who then occupied the area from the bank of the Lower Hunter to the southern and western shores of Lake Macquarie. After he inquired about coal the Aborigines directed him to some embedded in the headland. It was only upon his return to Sydney that he realised his error. The lake was thus known as Reid's Mistake until 1826 when it was renamed Lake Macquarie. Although I like the sound of “Reid’s Mistake” I wonder if it really should have been named Lake Awabakal.
October 16, 2003 | Permalink
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031203182239/mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2003/10/index.html
Californian Place Names
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This post is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic, Place Names.
The European colonization of California was at first northward expansion, from New Spain (Mexico), of Franciscan Missions. The tribes encountered by the friars already had names for the places they lived in, paddled to, the rivers they fished from, the woodlands whose acorns they ate. A lot of these names still survive--near here, for example, Napa, Sonoma, and Petaluma are all indigenous names--but for the most part California as far north as Sonoma, which is where the northernmost mission is located, is a quilt of Spanish--and often Catholic--place names. San Francisco. Santa Maria. [Sagrado] Sacramento. [Nuestra Señora de] Los Angeles, the largest city in the world dedicated to Our Lady.
Above Sonoma there are another 300 miles of California, and along the coast, where there were Russian outpost colonies in the eighteenth century, we have the interesting juxtaposition of Sebastopol next to Santa Rosa.
Then the Gold Rush ushered in the new waves of English, Germans, French, Spanish, and other Europeans, who turned to farming when the gold was gone. The small farming communities around here have mostly English names. Davis, originally Davisville, was named after a prominent farmer here in the late 19th century. (Vacaville, the most absurd place name I can think of in the vicinity--literally, "cow town" in Spanish then French--was named after a Mr. Vaca.) Arranged on a neat, orderly grid, Davis streets were named First, Second, and Third, with the cross streets the logical A, B, and C, and so on, which allow for expansion as needed, at least as far as the twenty-sixth letter.
New housing developments, however, eschew this pleasant logic and instead impose an arbitrary conglomeration of theme names, Disney-fashion. Thus, in Davis, we have the "college" neighborhood (Rutgers, Villanova, Radcliffe); the "painters" neighborhood (Picasso, Gaugin, Manet); the "bird" neighborhood (Mockingbird, Sandpiper, Pintail); and the "golf" neighborhood (Fairway, Country Club, Greenview). You get extra points for figuring out the relative socioeconomic status of the inhabitants.
There is one Davis neighborhood, however, whose street names are on a theme I find quite tickling. Village Homes, where we stayed back in spring for a couple of weeks, has street names straight out of Lord of the Rings. Imagine having an address like "420 Rivendell." You'd pay a lot for it: two-bedroom houses in this little progressive utopia sell for nearly $450,000 these days.
Posted by Pica at October 16, 2003 06:22 AM
Comments
I've never understood why there is such a contrast in the States between town names which echo a very mixed cultural past and street names which get into a frighteningly basic description in numbers. Presumably this only happens in some towns. I wonder if any towns have resisted or renamed their numbered streets or vice versa?
Posted by: Coup de Vent at October 16, 2003 07:15 AMThere'a a history in those "mercantile" street names, too. Lakewood, a streetcar suburb of Cleveland, has a development known as "birdtown" because all the teens, '20s and '30s streets are named for birds. The East Side of Cleveland was into Anglophilia in those days. Farther out, a raft of college names implies that somebody admired the Ivy League. Then there was the fellow who named streets in Kent after his family, "Rellim," for "Miller," being my favorite -- '60s stuff. Now that they pluck names from focus groups, future cartographers will get a snapshot of what focus groups like -- a slice of pop culture in any decade.
Cleveland, btw, was among the first to rename a welter of downtown streets according to a numbering system. It seems soulless at first, but it has a great advantage -- whereever you are, you have an idea of how far you have to go, so it's difficult to get lost.
Posted by: Pete zicari at October 16, 2003 01:53 PMSuburban street names are as vapid as their developments. Years ago as I was travelling in Calgary I went to find my friend's house. I had directions through the twisty suburban streets, but I forgot the street name; all I could remember was that it started with "Oak." I reasoned that I would easily find it.
Soon I came across Oakside Road and thought I struck gold when I arrived at an intersection with Oakside PLace. Following that street I found Oakside Crescent and Oakfield Drive, Oakcliffe, Oakwood and Oakmoor. It was hell. I knew I was really lost when I stumbled onto Cedar Ridge. Followed by Cedarbrae, Cedarpark, Cedarbrook and so on.
Whoever developed that street naming scheme in Calgary South, must have been smoking crack.
Posted by: Chris Corrigan at October 16, 2003 02:07 PMThere is a similar pattern to the European colonisation of both our countries - each culture leaves its own mark of ownership on the land by naming it in their own language. I wonder if these place names will exist in 100 or even 200 years time or whether they will be changed again?
Posted by: Jenny at October 16, 2003 11:20 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/10/16/californian_plac.html
Place-names
By under the fire star
This is my contribution to the Ecotone group-blogging topic, Place names:
Living in an ex-colony, I've discovered, means that place-names are highly mutable. The funniest example came during the Vietnam War, when the American Consulate in Calcutta went to sleep on Harrington Street and woke up on Ho Chi Minh Sarani - a little joke played on the Americans by the Communist government of the state of West Bengal, which continues to this day. (There's a useful page here with old and new names for Calcutta streets - I wish there were one for Chennai.)
The city where I live was called Madras for 350 years, since the British cobbled it together from a number of existing villages. (It survived long enough to give America a fabric called 'bleeding madras,' in the sixties of the last century.) In 1996, some local politicians decided that Madras was a 'colonial' name, and should be replaced with a 'real' Tamil name, Chennai. Ironically, the writer Shashi Tharoor has some scathing things to say (this is the cached version -- couldn't get the original) about the name and the decision. It seems that Chennai was originally Chennappa-pattinam, a settlement named after a local Telugu (not Tamil) chieftain. Local historian S. Muthiah thinks that, if the name had to be changed at all - he opposed it - it should have been changed to Mylapore, the largest of the existing villages brought within the city limits. Mylapore was an ancient seaport, which sent traders and culture-bearers across the sea to Southeast Asia. However, the city's residents were not asked for their opinions, and here we are in Chennai.
Names are being changed all over the country. In the state where I live, Thirunelvelli (Sacred Rice Field) was too hard for the British to pronounce, so they called it Tinnevelly. It has now reverted to its old name. Likewise Thiruchirapalli, which the British called Trichinopoly. And Udhagamandalam, which was 'anglicised' into Ootacamund -- but never mind, everyone has always called it Ooty.
Within the city, street names are changing too rapidly for most. Mount Road and its successor, Anna Salai (named for the late politician Annadurai, whose nickname was Anna, 'big brother') co-exist fairly comfortably. I wrote earlier about how I discovered that Lattice Bridge Road, or LB Road, had been renamed Dr. Muthulakshmi Road -- and that change apparently happened at least two years ago. It is still known by its old name.
At one stage, the state government decreed that caste names should be removed from the road names -- since caste is linked with social status. So Moubrays Road became C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer Road, and then 'Iyer' was dropped. A row of small streets in George Town, which was Black Town -- i.e. the 'native' town -- until the early twentieth century, had been named for local merchants, whose caste name was Chetty. Now instead of Linghi Chetty Street, Kondi Chetty Street, Arabulu Chetty Street and so on, we have Linghi Street, Kondi Street, Arubulu Street... I have been told that somewhere in the city there was a Lady Nair Street, named for the grandmother of a friend of ours, who had been ennobled by the British. After the caste names were removed it became Lady Street.
Some names change by popular usage: as spoken in Tamil, Hamilton Bridge lost its L and sounded like Ambittan ('barber') Bridge. It was translated back into English as Barbers Bridge. Now it has been renamed for a champion of rights for Untouchables, or Dalits, as they are called today: Ambedkar Bridge.
I'm sure that the British names which still remain - Peters, Lloyds, General Patters, Chamiers, Bishops Garden, and so on - will vanish eventually. You have to be quick on your feet to keep up with all this, or things slip out from under you. When I started writing this blog I had to decide whether to refer to Madras or to Chennai, and I opted for inevitability. But when people talk to each other it's still Madras. Or sometimes Chennai. Everything exists at the same time.
Place Name Blunders
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on place names.
An ongoing project in many of the world's natural history museums is to digitize their collections. In this modern era, typewritten herbarium specimen labels, handwritten field notes, and labels dangling from the feet of taxidermied mice are much more useful to people if they're captured in a database, and, ideally, placed online.
One attribute that is very important to record digitally is the locality of the specimen, needed to make any sort of map of the critter's distribution. Nowadays we all run around with GPS units which means that it's easy to record the exact latitude and longitude of a specimen, but the naturalists of yore didn't have such luck. Usually they would record localities in a telegraphic description such as "Sonoma Mt. Road, 4.2 miles E Adobe Rd., Sonoma Co., Calif." It is possible, with a large supply of undergraduate laborers and a good map collection, to convert these text localities into lat-long coordinates, and many museums are now diving into this tedious process.
Alas, some of these localities are a bit more cryptic than one would prefer. Lake of Boys???
Posted by Numenius at October 18, 2003 10:25 PM
Comments
I like the Failed Motel. Used to be the Bates Motel, right?
Posted by: Doc Rock at October 19, 2003 01:21 PMFunny, and all too typical. In some ways, I found the list refreshing (if un-useful) in this age of data-detail.
Posted by: beth at October 19, 2003 03:19 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/10/18/place_name_blund.html