A Place Called Peculiar: Stories About Unusual American Place-Names
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A Place Called Peculiar: Stories About Unusual American Place-Names
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486310817 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 11/29/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 701 KB |
About the Author
Veteran magazine writer Frank K. Gallant reports that there are more than 3 million toponyms (place names) in the United States and that "more than once, I have driven an embarrassing number of miles to visit a town with an unusual name."
Read an Excerpt
A PLACE CALLED Peculiar
Stories About Unusual American Place-Names
By Frank K. Gallant
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 Frank K. GallantAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-31081-7
CHAPTER 1
Alabama
SMUT EYE
On State Route 239 about 35 miles from the Georgia border
The librarian in Union Springs, county seat of Bullock County, suggested I call Mrs. Annie Pope, who told me this name had to do with her father-in-law, who ran a blacksmith's shop "up here on the corner." "Uncle" George Pope also pulled teeth, made caskets, served as the horse doctor, and distributed a remedy for ground itch (an itching skin inflammation caused by a parasitic worm). "He got dead before I came in the family," Mrs. Pope explained.
George Pope's smithy was the local gathering place; men played checkers and card games there when there wasn't any work, or if they were too old for it. It was also where you went to vote. The shop was so dirty and smoky that the men went home with smut (soot) in their eyes.
Storekeeper Walter Caddel (see Blues Old Stand, page 3) says he heard it a different way: that the blacksmith's face was always covered with so much smut that all you could see of it was the whites of his eyes.
Smut Eye was originally called Welcome.
VINEGAR BEND
Just off State Route 57 in the southwestern part of the state
This tiny town was originally called Lumbertown after the sawmill that opened here in 1900. The sawmill company built a railroad to the Gulf Coast (about 30 miles south) to ship logs and lumber out and food and other supplies in.
One day in 1910, as freight was being unloaded near a bend in the Escatawpa River, a barrel of vinegar burst. From then on, the railroad workers jokingly called the town Vinegar Bend. The name soon caught on with the townspeople, and it wasn't too long before the post office adopted the name and the sawmill changed its name to Vinegar Bend Lumber Company.
That story comes from retired Vinegar Bend postmaster J. T. Davidson. Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell, who pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1950s and was a North Carolina congressman from 1969 to 1975, tells a slightly different version. He says that his birthplace was named earlier, when the railroad was being built, and some workers had to dump a barrel of sorghum molasses into the river because it had soured and turned into vinegar. The workers used sorghum molasses to sweeten their coffee and grits, so this was probably a major blow to morale.
Arkansas has a Pickle Gap which some people say got its name from an incident in which a barrel of pickles rolled off a wagon and broke open.
Other Unusual Place-Names in Alabama
BLUES OLD STAND
At the intersection of County Route 19 and State Route 15 in Bullock County about five miles west-northwest of Smut Eye (see page 1)
Walter Caddel, who keeps the store here, says the name comes from an old man named Blue who ran a "shotgun store" out of a wagon. When a permanent store was built (the same building Caddel now owns) by another man, people continued to refer to the locale as Blue's Stand. The word old crept in between the two words with the passage of time, as it frequently does in the South.
Caddel keeps an old tattered clipping from the Montgomery Advertiser behind the counter to show people who ask about the name.
ECLECTIC
On State Route 63 about 20 miles northeast of Montgomery
Dr. M.L. Fielder named the town soon after the Civil War for the eclectic medicine he had studied in a northern school. He apparently hoped, too, that it would become an eclectic community, because he offered a free acre of land to anyone, black or white, who would build a home here. The town got a post office in 1879 and was incorporated in 1907.
GALLANT
On County Route 35 ten miles west of Gadsden
Gallant, according to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, means "spirited" and "brave," "splendid" and "stately," and "chivalrous." That's your author, of course.
The Gallant who gave this town its name arrived from Tennessee shortly after the Civil War. Almost all us Gallants here in the New World are descendants of Michele Haché-Gallant, the first white settler of Prince Edward Island, Canada. French-speaking Catholics, the Gallants were among the thousands of Acadians expelled from eastern Canada by the British beginning in 1755. Many migrated to the American South; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow told the story of their exodus to Louisiana in the poem Evangeline.
By the way, my given name, Frank, appears on the map in the northeast corner of Maryland, near Port Deposit.
ZIP CITY
On State Route 17 ten miles north of Florence
Although this community was settled around 1817, it had no formal name until the Automobile Age, according to Lauderdale County historian Sandra Sockwell. Local resident Alonzo Parker is credited with giving the town its whimsical name after observing cars zipping along the Chisholm Road toward the Tennessee line, about three miles north. Liquor could be purchased legally in Wayne County, Tennessee, and at the time (the 1920s) Lauderdale was a dry county.
CHAPTER 2Alaska
CHICKEN
On the Taylor Highway 58 miles south-southwest of Eagle and about 70 miles west of Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada
This town was named for the willow ptarmigan, a pheasant-like bird that changes color—from light brown to snow white—as winter comes on. It is the state bird, and chicken is its nickname. A mining camp and post office were established here in 1903.
The early Alaskans must have seen these birds every time they turned around. Evidence for this can be found in Donald Orth's Dictionary of Alaska Place Names (a principal source of information for Alaskan place-names), which cites 17 geographical features named chicken—13 creeks, a cove, a ridge, an island, and a mountain—and more than 30 named ptarmigan. Combined, they are the grand champions of Alaska place-names.
Another source says that this place takes its name from the fact that prospectors found nuggets of gold the size of chicken feed here. That sounds big to me, but my dictionary says chicken feed has been slang for "a paltry sum" (no, not "poultry") since the 1830s.
NOME
On the southern shore of the Seward Peninsula in the western part of the state
This is one of the most notorious examples of accidental place naming in the world, the result of a map-making mistake. Toponymists love it.
About 1850, a navigational chart was made aboard the British ship H.M.S. Herald while she lay at anchor in Norton Sound, off the Seward Peninsula. The cartographer wrote "? Name" beside a certain cape along the coast and moved on to other locations for which he had names and soundings. Later, when a second cartographer worked on another copy of the map he took the question mark as a "C" and wrote Cape Name. The "A" in Name apparently looked like an "O" and the location came out Cape Nome on the final version of the map.
Nome is the biggest and most well-known town in Eskimo country; it has long been an economic and cultural hub. Gold was found on its beaches in the summer of 1899, and news of the strike brought 30,000 argonauts to Nome the following summer. Half of them left before winter set in on what some wag dubbed the Golden Sands of Nome. Today the population hovers around 3,500.
Nome, Texas, was named at about the same time. In explaining why, people either tell a southern version of the map story or suggest that it was "liquid gold" (oil) that drew people there at the turn of the century.
SOURDOUGH
On the Richardson Highway about 130 miles northeast of Anchorage
This is the only place in the U.S. that I'm aware of that is named after a type of bread. Sourdough was a staple of the mining camps during the Gold Rush years in Alaska and the Yukon Territory. It was also the prospectors' term for an old hand—the kind of man who would still be around when the creek froze over and the temperature dropped to forty below.
This community is one of ten localities or geographical features in the state with this name. Gold Rush prospectors, whether they sifted creek sand here or in California, Colorado, or Idaho seemed to have a limited repertoire of place-names that appear over and over again (see Chicken, Alaska).
Other Unusual Place-Names in Alaska
NORTH POLE
On the Richardson Highway 14 miles southeast of Fairbanks
This little settlement was called Davis until the Dahl and Gaske Development Company bought it from the original homesteader, Bond V. Davis, after World War II. The developers hoped to attract a toy manufacturing plant with the name. Another of their fantasies was "Santaland," an Alaskan Disneyland.
The real North Pole is a good 1,600 miles farther north.
Literary Place-Names
FICTION WRITERS NEED names for their characters and the places they inhabit, and the names on the American landscape often are better than anything they could make up. Bret Harte wrote short stories about Poker Flat, Fiddletown, and Rough and Ready—all Gold Rush mining camps in northern California (see page 27). Larry McMurtry borrowed the name of a real Texas town, Lonesome Dove, for the title and setting of his best-selling Western epic. A musical that was a sideshow at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was set in Frog Level, North Carolina (a real place in Arkansas). Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Annie Proulx saw the name Quealy on the map of Wyoming, changed it to Queasy and had a great place-name for her novel Postcards.
In New York, it worked the other way around: A town changed its name to one made up by a writer, which sounds even more American than the original place-name. In December 1996, North Tarrytown became Sleepy Hollow, the place where the lovelorn pedagogue Ichabod Crane had a run-in with the Headless Horseman on Halloween. Washington Irving, the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Fiction writers seem to love the color, idiosyncrasy—even poetry—in American place-names. "There is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque," said Robert Louis Stevenson. Stephen Vincent Benét celebrated our place-names in a poem.
I have fallen in love with American names: The sharp, gaunt names that never get fat; The snakeskin titles of mining-claims; The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
Back to those novelists: One of my favorites, Pete Dexter, who invented a character with the unforgettable name of Paris Trout, lives in Useless Bay, Washington.
CHAPTER 3Arizona
CHRISTMAS
On State Route 77 about 27 miles south of Globe and a few miles northeast of Hayden in southeast-central Arizona
In the late 1880s, three prospectors discovered a thick vein of copper in the dry mountains a few miles north of where the Gila River joins the San Pedro. But they couldn't hold onto their claim because the copper lay within the San Carlos Indian Reservation. Several years later, a politically connected prospector named George B. Chittenden became interested in the claim, and in 1902 he succeeded in getting Congress to pass a bill to move the boundary line of the reservation. Chittenden arranged for a telegraph message to be sent from the nation's capital to Casa Grande when Congress voted, and then relayed to him by mounted messengers.
The news reached Chittenden on Christmas Day, his birthday. Chittenden rode immediately to the place where the copper was found and staked his claim, which he named for the day. The copper played out, and Christmas is a ghost town now—haunted by a greedy man who stole from the Indians with the help of the U.S. Congress.
Chittenden had a fiery temper, and that's why another Gila County settlement, now gone, was called Chilito—Spanish for "little peppers." That's what the Mexicans called Chittenden when he was postmaster there from 1913 to 1918.
SHOW LOW
On U.S. Route 60 in southeastern Navajo County in the eastern part of the state
In 1870, cattleman Marion Clark and Corydon E. Cooley, a famous Indian scout, started fencing in the sparse rangeland 40 miles north of Fort Apache. By the time they were done stringing barbed wire they had enclosed 100,000 acres. Several years later, the two ranchers had a disagreement and decided to dissolve their partnership. They would play a card game called seven-up, and the winner would buy out the other.
The game lasted all night. Near sunrise, with Cooley needing just one point to win, Clark, according to legend, challenged him: "You show low, and you win." Cooley cut the deck and showed the deuce of clubs—and won.
Today, an illustration of the lucky card graces the letterhead of the city of Show Low. City hall is on West Cooley and the main street of the small city is named Deuce of Clubs.
Seven-up, according to Hoyle, was the most popular card game among American gamblers until the rise of poker during the Civil War. It is one of a number of variations on the British game, all fours. In seven-up, the first person to score seven points wins. Points are earned for the high, low, and Jack of trumps and for game.
(See Midnight, Mississippi, page 122, for another place that was named for a card game.)
TOMBSTONE
On U.S. Route 80 halfway between Benson and Bisbee in the southeastern part of the state
Anyone who knows anything about the Old West has heard of this colorful and violent mining town where at 2:30 p.m. on October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp and "Doc" Holliday killed three members of the Clanton gang in a gunfight at the entrance to the OK Corral.
The town owes its beginning to prospector Ed Schieffelin, who came here in 1877 and started tramping around the hills with a pickax over his shoulder. Friends warned him that the only thing he'd find was his own tombstone. But instead of an Apache bullet, he found ledges of silver that by 1886 had lined miners' pockets with $37 million. Schieffelin named his first claim Tombstone.
The shantytown that sprung up overnight on the level ground closest to the mines was known as Goose Creek, but that lasted less than two years. The March 5, 1879 plat of the town bears the name Tombstone, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the grim prophecy given to Schieffelin.
The first newspaper published in town (1880) was the Epitaph.
Other Unusual Place-Names in Arizona
DOUBLE ADOBE
On a back road 11 miles east of Bisbee in the southeastern corner of the state
When the West was wild, Arizonans knew this location by a two-room adobe building with 18-inch thick walls. It made a good bunker if you were running from angry Apaches or had been seen driving a local rancher's cattle toward the Mexican border.
Adobe Walls, Texas, has a similar history. The nine-foot high adobe walls of an abandoned trading post protected traders and buffalo hunters from Indian attack. In 1874, locals survived a five-day siege by Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa attackers.
North Dakota once had a stagecoach stop called Double Walls Station in some historical accounts and Adobe Walls Station in others.
SNOWFLAKE
On State Route 77 not quite halfway between Show Low and Holbrook in the eastern part of Arizona
There are about a dozen places in the U.S. named for the cold white stuff. I like this one best, because, if the story is true, the name has nothing to do with weather. It honors the community's two founders, a Mr. Snow and a Mr. Flake.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A PLACE CALLED Peculiar by Frank K. Gallant. Copyright © 1998 Frank K. Gallant. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Copyright Page,
Alabama,
Alaska,
Arizona,
Arkansas,
California,
Colorado,
Connecticut,
Delaware,
Florida,
Georgia,
Idaho,
Illinois,
Indiana,
Iowa,
Kansas,
Kentucky,
Louisiana,
Maine,
Maryland,
Massachusetts,
Michigan,
Minnesota,
Mississippi,
Missouri,
Montana,
Nebraska,
Nevada,
New Hampshire,
New Jersey,
New Mexico,
New York,
North Carolina,
North Dakota,
Ohio,
Oklahoma,
Oregon,
Pennsylvania,
Rhode Island,
South Carolina,
South Dakota,
Tennessee,
Texas,
Utah,
Vermont,
Virginia,
Washington,
West Virginia,
Wisconsin,
Wyoming,