There are some regional differences in American given-names. In the South it is common for a girl to be given a surname as a given-name. Thus Barnett Snodgrass or Powell Smith may be female and lovely. Mrs. George E. Pickett, the second wife of the general, was baptized La Salle and called Sally. Beverly and Shirley are often encountered. Sometimes a girl is actually called George, Frank or Charles, after her father. It is also a custom down there to give a girl two names, and to call her by both. If she is christened Eva Belle she remains Eva Belle on all occasions, and is never merely Eva or Belle. Even the servants are always careful to call her Miss Eva Belle. These peculiarities are to be observed among the gentry; on lower levels there is a prodigious efflorescence of curious feminine names. The aim of every mother is to find a name for her darling that will be both exquisite and unprecedented, and not infrequently a rich if somewhat untutored fancy enters into the process. In the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee a recent inquirer unearthed Olsie, Hassie, Coba, Bleba, Onza, Retha, Otella and Latrina.114 “One girl,” he says, “was named Vest for no other reason than that her father wrapped her in his vest (English: waistcoat) when she was only a week old and carried her proudly across the hollow to display his first-born before admiring neighbors.” Another girl was called Delphia “cause her Pa, he went to Philadelphia once.” In the same vicinity lived a girl named Trailing Arbutus Vines. Another investigator, this time in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, found girls named Needa, Zannis, Avaline and Weeda (the last possibly a corruption of Ouida).115 Bold combinations of common given-names are frequent, e.g., Lucybelle, Floramay, Lilymary and Sallyrose. Dr. Louise Pound has unearthed some curious examples, e.g., Olouise (from Olive and Louise), Marjette (Marjorie + Henrietta), Maybeth (May + Elizabeth), Lunette (Luna + Nettie), Leilabeth (Leila + Elizabeth), Rosella (Rose + Bella), Adrielle (Adrienna + Belle), Birdene (Birdie + Pauline), Bethene (Elizabeth + Christine), Ola-belle (Ola + Isabel), and Armina (Ardelia + Wilhelmina).116 Even surnames and men’s given-names are employed in these feminine blends, as in Romiette (Romeo + Juliette), Adnelle (Addison + Nellie), Adelloyd (Addie + Lloyd), and Charline (Charles + Pauline). A woman professor in the Middle West has the given-name of Eldarema, coined from those of her grandparents, Elkanah, Daniel, Rebecca and Mary. The common feminine endings are often used to make entirely new names, some of them very florid in fancy. From Iowa Miss Katherine Buxbaum, of the State Teachers College at Cedar Falls, reports Darlene, Ombra, Orba, Eneatha, Bashie, Arrazeta, Averill, Beatha, Berneita, Burtyce, Chalene, Clarene, Coelo, Colice, Denva, Garnette, Glenice, Glenola, Icel, Lavaun, La Una, Mirnada, Orvetta, Retha, Twila, Vella, Verlie, Vista, Vola, Waive and Wave.117 From Idaho come Lejitta, Neuta, Navilla, Uarda, Du-priel, Jeneal, Onola, Oha, Dretha, Vilda, Verla, Utahna and Fava; from Texas, Estha, Edina, Blooma, Ardis, Iantha, Inabeth, Versey, Vivinne, DeRue, Leora, Ila, Gomeria, Swanell, Verla and Valaria;118 from Western Maryland, Le Esta, Dolor, Philadelphia, Emavida and Uretha; from Rhode Island, Murdena, Seril, Besma, Varlow, Satyra, Ithamer, Zilpah and Mosetta;119 from Alabama, Luda, Arrillah, Pet, Eusona, Leetha, Conola, Aklus, Metella, Homera and Mahala;120 and from the Pacific Coast, Mauna Loa, Icy Victorious, Henriola, Mirrle, Euliel, Catalpa, Syringia, Wistaria and Eschscholtzia.121 These regions of onomatological new growth, of course, are predominantly Protestant; in the domains of Holy Church the priests insist upon saints’ names, or at all events upon names that conceivable saints might conceivably bear. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that only the lowly patronize novel girls’ names. A correspondent in New York has unearthed the following from the Social Register for 1933 and 1934: Ambolena, Adgurtha, Anzonetta, Armella, Helentzi, Theotiste, Thusnelda, Berinthia, Belva Dula, Credilla, Chancie, Daisette, Estherina, Columbia Maypole, Melrose Abbey, Edelweiss, Yetive, Nopie, Velvalee, Lotawana, Isophene and Lamiza.
The masculine given-names of the Bible Belt are not quite so fanciful as the feminine names, but nevertheless they often depart widely from the accepted standards of the cities. American statesmen named Hoke, Ollie, Finis and Champ (a shortening of Beau-champ, pro. to rhyme with lamp) will be recalled. Miss Buxbaum reports pupils baptized Osey, Thorrel, Burl, Hadwen, Oriel, Lath, Zotas, Koith and Iloah (pro. I-lo), and “two stalwart young men named Merl and Verl.”122 From the Cumberlands of Tennessee James A. Still reports Oder, Creed, Waitzel, Esco, Oarly, Oral, Osie, Irby, Cam and Mord. Sometimes the pet-names of infancy persist, as in the cases of young men named Pee Wee, Poke, Cap, Babe and Hoss. Kentucky, which produced the himalayan Ollie James, now has a Cap R. Carden (b. 1866) in the House of Representatives (1935). Says Mr. Still:
Three brothers in the little settlement of Shawnee bear the names Meek, Bent and Wild. Lem and Lum are the names of twins. One young man carried the substantial name of Anvil, and another that of Whetstone. A small mountain boy has Speed as his Christian name.123
Excessive inbreeding among the mountain people may be responsible in part for this vogue for strange given-names. “When forty-seven persons in one hollow,” says Miss Miriam M. Sizer, of Sperry-ville, Va.,124 “possess identical surnames, the given-name becomes the common distinguishing factor.” Many of the usual American given-names are in use, but sometimes the supply that is locally familiar seems to run out. Miss Sizer’s novelties include Nias, Bloomer, Tera, Malen, Lony, Geurdon, Brasby, Ather, Delmer, Rector, Doley, Elzie, Ivason and Elmer Catholic. “A man who was a great admirer of the James brothers,” she says, “named his boy Jesse-James-and-Frank. Another … named his boy Christopher-Columbus-Who-Discovered-America.” At Wetumka, Ala., near Montgomery, there is a tombstone to the memory of “Henry Ritter Ema Ritter Dema Ritter Sweet Potatoe Creamatartar Caroline Bostick, daughter of Bob and Suckey Catlen; born at Social Circle, 1843; died at Wetumka, 1852.” Obviously, Bob and Suckey admired the whole Ritter family.
Among the Negroes there is naturally a considerable exaggeration of this reaching out for striking and unprecedented names. They have, rather curiously, inherited no given-names from their African ancestors. It is possible that Cuffy, which was a common Negro name in the Eighteenth Century, and became a generic name for Negroes later on, was of African origin, but it seems more likely that it was derived from the Dutch koffie (coffee). The early slaves were given such names as Cato, Caesar, Hector, Pompey, Jupiter and Agamemnon.125 But when they began to assume their masters’ surnames they also took all the more usual American given-names, and today the nomenclature of the educated portion of them is indistinguishable from that of the whites. Here are the given-names of the clergy mentioned on the church page of a single issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the principal Negro newspapers: Frederick, John, Talmadge, James, Allen, Miles, Louis, Arthur, Wilbur, George, Claude. Even in the South, according to Urban T. Holmes of the University of North Carolina,126 Negro parents “have, for the most part, kept to standard names.” But when they depart from the standard they sometimes go even further than their fellow Methodists and Baptists of the dominant race. In Rockingham county, North Carolina, Mr. Holmes unearthed Agenora, Alferita, Artice, Audri-valus, Earvila, Eldeese, Julina, Katel, Limmer, Louvenia, Ludie, Mareda, Margorilla, Matoka, Orcellia, Princilla, Reada, Roanza, Ven-ton Orlaydo and Vertie Ven, and elsewhere in the total immersion country other Marco Polos have discovered Clendolia, Deodolphus, Pernella, Delsey, Nazarene, Zion, Vashti, Sociamelia and Messiah. Medical men making a malaria survey of Northampton county, North Carolina, staggered back to civilization with the news that they had found male Aframericans named Handbag Johnson, Squirrel Bowes, Prophet Ransom, Bootjack Webb and Solicitor Ransom, and females named Alimenta, Iodine, Zooa, Negolia, Abolena, Arginta and Dozine.127 And from New Orleans, at about the same time, came news of two Negro babies who, born during a flood, were christened Highwater and Overflow.128 A similar catastrophe produced William McKinley Louisiana Levee Bust Smith, reported by Miss Naomi C. Chappell, of Richmond, Va.129 On Miss Chappell’s list are also Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Harry Stringfellow Johnson, Charlotte County Roberts, Theophilus Otis Is
rabestis Tott, Claude St. Junius Eugene Leech Abraham Bonaparte Springer Hartsfield Love Gray Nixon, and Matthew Mark Luke John Acts-of-the-Apostles Son-of-Zebedee Garden-of-Gethsemane Hill, this last the name of a colored pastor’s son. But Miss Chappell’s prize discovery is Pism C. Jackson — named by a devout mother after the Hundredth Psalm (Psalm C)! Other investigators of Afro-American onomatology have favored me, inter alia, with the following specimens: Himself Yubank, Slaughter Bugg, Lingo D. Graham, Notre Dame Richards, Erie Canal Jackson, Lemon Mitchell, Munsing Underwear Johnson, Gentle Judge McEachern, King Solomon Ray, Nazro Barefoot, Magazine Shaw, Pictorial Review Jackson (called Torial for short), Tennessee Iron and Coal Brown, Earthly Gaskin, Hebrew Hill, Lutheran Liggon, Utensil Yvonne Johnson, Savannah Satan, Missouri Soup and Fate Cutts.130 Three of the sisters of Joe Louis the pugilist are Eammarell, Eulalia and Vunies.131 The name of Positive Wassermann Johnson, reported from Evanston, Ill., probably represents the indelicate humor of a medical student. The young brethren who deliver colored mothers in the vicinity of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore sometimes induce the mothers to give their babies grandiose physiological and pathological names, but these are commonly expunged later on by watchful social workers and colored pastors. Placenta, Granuloma and Gonadia, however, seem to have survived in a few cases.
3. PLACE-NAMES
“There is no part of the world,” said Robert Louis Stevenson,132 “where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as the United States of America. All times, races and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellfontaine, and with Sandusky. The names of the States themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota and the Carolinas: there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land.” A glance at the latest United States Official Postal Guide133 or report of the United States Geographic Board134 quite bears out this encomium. The map of the country is besprinkled with place-names from at least half a hundred languages, living and dead, and among them one finds examples of the most daring and charming fancy. There are Spanish, French and Indian names as melodious and charming as running water; there are names out of the histories and mythologies of all the great races of man; there are names grotesque and names almost sublime. “Mississippi!” rhapsodized Walt Whitman; “the word winds with chutes — it rolls a stream three thousand miles long … Monongahela! it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.” Nor was Whitman the first to note this loveliness: Washington Irving was writing about it in the Knickerbocker Magazine so long ago as 1839,135 and in 1844 Henry R. Schoolcraft printed an appreciative treatise upon the Indian names in New York State.136 Between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century about thirty studies of American place-names appeared, and since then the number has run to nearly a hundred. The majority of these works have been of small value, but Lewis H. Mc-Arthur’s “Oregon Geographic Names”137 is a treatise worthy of the highest praise, and since the appearance of Allen Walker Read’s very judicious “Plans for the Study of Missouri Place-Names” in 1928138 the investigation of the subject has been put upon a really scientific basis.139
The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little imagination in naming the new settlements and natural features of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable tendency, at the start, was to make use of names familiar at home, or to invent banal compounds. Plymouth Rock at the North and Jamestown at the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they filled the narrow tract along the coast with new Bostons, Cambridges, Bristols and Londons, and often used the adjective as a prefix. But this was only in the days of beginning. Once they had begun to move back from the coast and to come into contact with the aborigines and with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they encountered rivers, mountains, lakes and even towns that bore far more engaging names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce adopted. The native names of such rivers as the James, the York and the Charles succumbed, but those of the Potomac, the Patapsco, the Merrimac and the Penobscot survived, and they were gradually reinforced as the country was penetrated. Most of these Indian names, in getting upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe simplifications. Potowan-meac was reduced to Potomack and then to Potomac; Unéaukara became Niagara; Reckawackes, by folk etymology, was turned into Rockaway, and Pentapang into Port Tobacco.140 But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are responsible for much of the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature. Such names as Tallahassee, Susquehanna, Mississippi,141 Allegheny, Chicago, Kennebec, Patuxent and Kalamazoo give a barbaric brilliancy to the American map.
Ye say they all have passed away,
That noble race and brave;
That their light canoes have vanished
From off the crested wave;
That mid the forests where they roamed
There rings no hunter’s shout;
But their name is on your waters;
Ye may not wash it out.142
The settlement of the continent, once the Eastern coast ranges were crossed, proceeded with unparalleled speed, and so the naming of the new rivers, lakes, peaks and valleys, and of the new towns and districts, strained the inventiveness of the pioneers. The result is the vast duplication of names that shows itself in the Postal Guide. No less than eighteen imitative Bostons and New Bostons still appear, and there are nineteen Bristols, twenty-eight Newports, and twenty-two Londons and New Londons. Argonauts starting out from an older settlement on the coast would take its name with them, and so we find Fhiladelphias in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, Richmonds in Iowa, Kansas and nine other Western States, and Princetons in fifteen. Even when a new name was hit upon it seems to have been hit upon simultaneously by scores of scattered bands of settlers; thus we find the whole land bespattered with Washingtons, Lafayettes, Jeffersons and Jacksons, and with names suggested by common and obvious natural objects, e.g., Bear Creek, Bald Knob and Buffalo. The Geographic Board, in its fourth report, made a belated protest against this excessive duplication. “The names Elk, Beaver, Cottonwood and Bald,” it said, “are altogether too numerous.” Of postoffices alone there are fully a hundred embodying Elk; counting in rivers, lakes, creeks, mountains and valleys, the map of the United States probably shows at least twice as many such names.
A study of American place-names reveals eight general classes, as follows: (a) those embodying personal names, chiefly the surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; (b) those transferred from other and older places, either in the Eastern States or in Europe; (c) Indian names; (d) Dutch, Spanish, French, German and Scandinavian names; (e) Biblical and mythological names; (f) names descriptive of localities; (g) names suggested by local flora, fauna or geology; (h) purely fanciful names. The names of the first class are perhaps the most numerous. Some consist of surnames standing alone, as Washington, Cleveland, Bismarck, Lafayette, Taylor and Randolph; others consist of surnames in combination with various old and new Grundwörter, as Pittsburgh, Knoxville, Bailey’s Switch, Hagers-town, Franklinton, Dodge City, Fort Riley, Wayne Junction and McKeesport; and yet others are contrived of given-names, either alone or in combination, as Louisville, St. Paul, Elizabeth, Johnstown, Charlotte, Williamsburg and Marysville. All our great cities are surrounded by grotesque Bensonhursts, Bryn Joneses, Smithvales and Krauswoods. The number of towns in the United States bearing women’s given-names is enormous. I find, for example, eleven post-offices called Charlotte, ten called Ada and no less than nineteen called Alma. Most of these places are small, but there is an Elizabeth with nearly 125,000 population, an Elmira with 50,000, and an Augusta with more than 60,000.
The names of the second class we have already briefly observed. They are betrayed in many cases by the prefix New; more than 600 such postoffices are recorded, ranging from New Albany to New Windsor. Others bear s
uch prefixes as West, North and South, or various distinguishing affixes, e.g., Bostonia, Pittsburgh Landing, Yorktown and Hartford City. One often finds Eastern county names applied to Western towns and Eastern town names applied to Western rivers and mountains. Thus, Cambria, which is the name of a county but not of a postoffice in Pennsylvania, is a town in seven Western States; Baltimore is the name of a glacier in Alaska, and Princeton is the name of a peak in Colorado. In the same way the names of the more easterly States often reappear in the West, e.g., in Mount Ohio, Colo., Delaware, Okla., and Virginia City, Nev. The tendency to name small American towns after the great capitals of antiquity has excited the derision of the English since the earliest days; there is scarcely an English book upon the States without some fling at it. Of late it has fallen into abeyance, though sixteen Athenses still remain, and there are yet many Carthages, Uticas, Spartas, Syracuses, Romes, Alexandrias, Ninevehs and Troys.143 The third city of the nation, Philadelphia, got its name from the ancient stronghold of Philadelphus of Pergamon. To make up for the falling off of this old and flamboyant custom, the more recent immigrants brought with them the names of the capitals and other great cities of their fatherlands. Thus the American map now bristles with Berlins, Bremens, Hamburgs, Warsaws and Leipzigs, and also shows Stock-holms, Venices, Belgrades and Christianias.144
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