The study of the place-names of North Carolina goes back to 1888, when Kemp P. Battle printed a pamphlet on those of the counties,9 but the field has been neglected since.10 The same thing may be said of North Dakota and Ohio, the place-name bibliographies of which are limited to a few superficial items. For Ohio the most interesting is “Origin of Ohio Place Names,” by Maria Ewing Martin, though it deals with the history of the settlement of the State rather than with its nomenclature, and is now sadly dated.1 The Indian place-names of the State come from the languages of a dozen or more different tribes, and in pre-settlement days the same place often bore as many successive names. Scioto is Wyandot, Chillicothe is Shawnee, Coshocton is Delaware, and Miami is from the Ottawa word for mother. The early whites abandoned most of the Indian names and substituted trite inventions of their own, mainly brought from the East, e.g., Farmington, New Philadelphia Newark, Dover and North Amherst.2 For North Dakota the most interesting paper is a brief one on coined town names by Dorothy J. Hughes,3 e.g., Alkabo, from alkali and gumbo; Grenora, from Great Northern Railway, and Sandoun, from sand-dune.
The place-names of Oklahoma have been dealt with at length by Dr. Charles N. Gould, director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey and professor of geology in the State University4 and its French names have had separate treatment.5 Gould says that less than one percent of them are of French origin and less than a quarter of one percent Spanish. He calls attention to “the rather unusual abundance of feminine names of postoffices,” and lists more than a hundred, ranging from Abbie and Addielle to Violet and Zula. The of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1931, p. 1312, e.g., Pinch Gut, Lick Log, Broken Leg, Naked Place, Burnt Pone, Four-Killer, Chunky Gal, How Come You, Jerkem Tight, Big Bugaboo and Barren She. The Federal Writers’ Project brought out How They Began—the Story of North Carolina County, Town and Other Place Names in 1941, but it need not detain us. place-names of Oregon are discussed at length in the excellent monograph of Lewis A. McArthur, already mentioned – in many ways the best study of its sort yet done in America. The origin of the State name has been long debated. Stewart produces impressive evidence in “Names on the Land” that it may be derived from Ouaricon, which in turn was derived from Ouriconsint, an early French name for a vague “River of the West,” apparently borrowed from the Indians.1 If this theory is sound, then Oregon and Wisconsin both came from the same source.2
A. Howry Espenshade’s “Pennsylvania Place Names”3 is a volume of 375 pages and lists more than 1200 names. It is not to be mentioned in the same breath with McArthur’s “Oregon Geographic Names,” but there is nevertheless a lot of useful information in it, and it will form a springboard for some later, more comprehensive and better arranged work. It was preceded by small studies by Henry W. Shoemaker4 and Stephen G. Boyd5 and followed by others by George P. Donehoo6 and William Pierce Randel.7 Rhode Island, as I have recorded, produced one of the earliest studies of American place-names, that of Usher Parsons in 1861, but since then little has been done in the field. There is a State Geographic Board and in 1932 it brought out an “Official Gazetteer of Rhode Island” in collaboration with the United States Geographic Board, but the remaining literature is mainly only local in interest. In 1941 the Federal Writers’ Project for South Carolina published at Columbia a volume entitled “Palmetto Place Names,” but it was far from complete and is now out of print.1
The fact that South Dakota has a volume on its place-names comparable to McArthur’s on those of Oregon is due to the enterprise of Dr. Edward C. Ehrensperger, professor of the English language and literature in its State University at Vermillion.2 At the suggestion of Robert L. Ramsay of Missouri, before mentioned, he put some of his candidates for the M.A. degree to work investigating the place-names of the State, and presently he had in hand a series of valuable theses. When the Federal Writers’ Project undertook to deal with the same names, he lent his materials and his skill to the business, and the result was a really first-rate report. It is laid out upon a somewhat unhandy plan, with separate alphabets for towns, counties, rivers, mountains, etc., but the extraordinary richness of the data assembled makes the user forget this defect, and soon or late it will probably be remedied in a revision based upon a single alphabet. There is no comprehensive treatise on Tennessee names, but there have been brief discussions of them by Horace Kephart,3 P. M. Fink,4 A. W. McWhorter5 and James A. Still.6 Kephart lists such curiosities as No Time, Big Soak and Go Forth from the Tennessee Pamirs and Fink unearths Venus, Bacchus and Lesbia from the effete lowlands.1
Texas has a good guide to the names of its 2,148 postoffices in “Texas Towns,” by Fred I. Massengill.2 J. Frank Dobie, the authority on the folklore of the Southwest, has published some papers on other place-names of the State,3 and there is a book on the 254 county names by Z. T. Fulmore,4 but the rest of the writing on the subject is journalistic and thin.5 Utah has a mimeographed volume in the Federal Writers’ Project series,6 but “origin of name unknown” follows many of its 400-odd entries. It shows that the Mormons have had relatively little influence upon the geographical nomenclature of their Zion. They failed at the outset in their effort to call it Deseret, a term appearing in the Book of Mormon,7 and had to submit to Utah, the name of a tribe of Shoshone Indians, chiefly notable for their thieving and neglect of personal hygiene.8 No Utah county bears a name taken from the Book of Mormon, though several have the names of early Mormon worthies. There is a small village called Deseret, and others bearing the Mormon names of Lehi, Manti, Nephi and Moroni, but such borrowings are not numerous. Most of the settlements of the State have flabby names, e.g., Centerville, Riverdale, Coal City, Clearfield and Lakeside. Upalco is derived from Uintah Power and Light Company, and Veyo was begotten by butchering verdure and youth and then grafting their fragments. Most of the picturesque early names have been obliterated by the growth of delicacy. What was once the village of Carcass Creek is now Grover, Poverty Flat is Torrey, Sahara is Zane (from Zane Gray), and Sodom is Goshen.
I come to Vermont, and have nothing to say, for its place-names seem to have been given no attention by its native savants.1 Those of Virginia have done but little better. Forty years ago Charles M. Long published a book on the names of the State’s counties,2 and in 1940 George Davis McJimsey produced an exhaustive and excellent study of its topographical terms (not place-names),3 but aside from these there is not much to report.4 The State of Washington has books on its place-names by Edmond S. Meany5 and Henry Landes,6 but both belong to an earlier generation, and there has been but little activity in the matter in recent years. In West Virginia, as I have noted, there is the book of Hamill Kenny, published in 1945 – a large and extremely valuable work, worthy to be ranked with those of McArthur on Oregon and Ehrensperger on South Dakota. Indeed, there are details in which it is superior to everything else of its sort – for example, in the richness of its notes on history and legend. It is preceded by an admirable introduction dealing with the methodology of place-name study, and there is a good bibliography.7 The study of the place-names of Wisconsin was begun in 1854 with a report to the State Historical Society by Alfred Brunson. It was resumed by the Rev. Chrysostom Verwyst in 1892 with a monograph upon those of Chippewa origin,1 and continued a decade later by Henry E. Legler,2 but after that there was nothing more until Dr. Frederic G. Cassidy, of the State university, undertook a study of the place-names of Dane county, surrounding Madison.3 This brings us to Wyoming, the literature of which appears to be confined to a pamphlet on its stream-names, brought out by the State Game and Fish Department4 and a brief but excellent paper by Dr. Wilson O. Clough, of the State university.5
The French names of Canada resemble the Spanish names of the Southwest in that they are frequently very long, e.g., Saint-Jean-Baptiste de l’Ile Verte, Notre-Dame de Lourdes de Montjoli and Coeur-Très-Pur de la Bienheureuse Vierge Marie de Plaisance, but usually though not always, it is the last element that is used for everyday purposes, not the first or a middle one, as in the case of Los An
geles. Some of the combinations of French and English are not without humor, e.g., Notre-Dame de l’Assomption de Mac-Nider and Saint-Henri des Tanneries. Canada has had a Geographic Board like our own since 1897,6 and there is another for Quebec alone, where the great majority of place-names are French, and a Nomenclature Board for Newfoundland. The first has endeavored to preserve locally accepted name-forms whenever possible, but is required by law to follow forms “found in the statutes, proclamations, orders in council or other official acts of a Province” establishing districts or communities, and it has frequently been troubled by the fact that, in the French districts, many towns have two names, one French and the other English, e.g., Trois-Rivières and Three Rivers. Also it has been considerably harassed by demands from Quebec that all the c’s in place-names be changed to k’s, on the ground that, in French, c is used only in foreign loans.1 The board has got rid of the offending k in many Indian names by approving the substitution of French names, e.g., Dufresnoy for Kajakanikamak, but it survives defiantly in many others, e.g., Kakekekwaki.2
Canada, like the United States, is afflicted by the heavy duplication of names. There are thirty-seven Blanche rivers in Quebec alone, and hundreds of names, in the Dominion as a whole, embodying Moose, Trout, Bear, Deer, etc. The picturesque names translated from the Indian languages by the pioneers, or invented by their own fancy, are under fire and many have been changed. Moose Factory, on James Bay, is now Moosonoe, Rat Portage is Kenora and Pile o’ Bones creek is Regina. But Medicine Hat and Moosejaw happily survive.
The Geographic Board has published a number of valuable monographs on the place-names of various parts of Canada, e.g., Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and the Thousand Islands. There is also a considerable literature on the subject by private inquirers, among them Pierre-Georges Roy,3 W. F. Ganong,4 H. L. Keenleyside,5 George H. Armstrong,6 John T. Walbran,7 W. F. Moore,8 Frank Eames,1 Charles N. Bell2 and Thomas J. Brown.3 The origin of Canada has long engaged geographers and many fantastic etymologies have been offered, but the predominance of opinion today seems to favor its derivation from an Indian word, kanata, which is defined by Roy as meaning ville, village, amas de cabànes, bourgade, bourg, groupe de tentes, campement de plusieurs. The Indian guides of the early explorers called out kanata every time they passed a village on the St. Lawrence, and the explorers mistook the word for the name of the country.4
In AL4, p. 115, I have listed some of the novelties in geographical nomenclature which appeared with the settlement of America. Such ancient English terms as moor, heath, dell, fell, fen, weald and combe5 disappeared from the vocabulary, and in place of them there arose a large stock of novelties, e.g., branch, run, fork, bluff, hollow, bottom, lick, neck, gap, notch, divide, knob and flat. A few of these, to be sure, were known in England, but they were not common there, whereas in the new land they became words of everyday. As the settlements extended terms were borrowed from the French, e.g., rapids, prairie and butte; from the Dutch, e.g., hook and kill,6 and from the Spanish, e.g., cany on, mesa and sierra.7 Rather curiously, no Indian term seems to have been taken in8 save only bayou, which came from the Choctaw bayuk through the French. Many of these terms are confined to relatively small areas. Those from the Dutch are scarcely to be found outside southeastern New York and northern New Jersey, and many from the Spanish are understood only in the Southwest, e.g., arroyo and vega Butte and coulee, which are from the French, are pretty well limited to the West, and I am assured by a Southern correspondent that run is rare south of Virginia,1 just as pond for a natural body of water is rare outside New England. Gulch, which is of uncertain origin, is commonly thought of as Western today, but the DAE’s first example, dated 1835, is from Newfoundland. Notch is used in New England for what is commonly called a gap south of New York. Creek, which is mainly applied to an arm of the sea in England, has the same sense along the Chesapeake, but elsewhere it usually means a small country stream. Swamp, as I have noted in Supplement I, pp. 496–97, is unknown in England save as an exoticism, and so are barrens, bad lands and bluff.2
How many place-names are there in the United States? Allen Walker Read, in a paper read before the American Dialect Society at Indianapolis, December 30, 1941, ventured to guess “well over a million,” and in view of the fact that Ramsay and his associates have unearthed 32,324 in Missouri alone this estimate seems quite reasonable. In addition, there are many thousands of obsolete names, recoverable from old maps and records, and George R. Stewart once told me that he thought they might amount to another million. Thus the field of place-name study is immense, with room in it for an army corps of investigators.
1 See AL4, pp. 234–36.
2 Pennsylvania Place Names, by A. Howry Espenshade; State College (Pa.), 1925, p. 120.
3 See AL4, p. 539.
4 There is a good discussion of it in Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast, by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm; Orono (Maine), 1941, pp. 1 and 2.
5 The etymology of the name is discussed at length in A History of the Origin of the Place Names in Nine Northwestern States; Chicago, 1908, pp. 102–03.
1 “The main problem of American place-name study,” said the distinguished German philologian, Max Förster of Munich, in American Speech, Oct., 1939, p. 213, “seems to me the investigation of American names of Indian origin.… There is only one drawback: that the scientific study of Indian languages and dialects is hardly advanced enough to form a safe basis.”
2 Washington, 1933, p. 12.
3 Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board, just cited, pp. 13–14. The DAE shows that there was an inn called the Conestoga Waggon in Philadelphia in 1750.
1 American Place-Names, by Louis N. Feipel, American Speech, Nov., 1925, p. 83.
2 Spanish and Indian Place Names of California, by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez; San Francisco, 1914, p. 47. The Geographical Board long ago declared for Tia Juana, but most American newspapers use Tijuana.
3 The process was witnessed on a large scale in France during the two World Wars. Ypres became Wipers, Isigny became Easy Knee, and Bricquebec became Bricabrac. The French themselves began it in Napoleonic times by giving a village in Spain the name of the English Horse Guards – and then turning it into Hossegar. See Some Folk Etymologies for Place Names, by J. W. Aston, Journal of American Folklore, April-June, 1944, pp. 139–40.
4 A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, by Harold W. Bentley; New York, 1932, p. 17.
5 Language Mixture in American. Place Names, by Mamie Meredith, American Speech, Feb., 1930, p. 224.
1 Bentley just cited, says that there are more than 400 in California and more than 250 in New Mexico.
2 Der deutschamerikanische Farmer, by J. T. Och; Cincinnati, 1913, pp. 228–35.
3 French Names in Our Geography, by Henry G. Bayer, Romanic Review, July-Sept., 1930, pp. 195–203.
4 Roy W. Swanson, in Scandinavian Place-Names in the American Danelaw, Swedish-American Historical Bulletin, Aug., 1929, p. 8, says that he has counted more than 400 in that State. In The Viking and the Red Man; two volumes; New York, 1940–42, Reider T. Sherwin argues that many place-names presumed to be of Indian origin were actually borrowed by the Indians from Norse settlers of a thousand years ago. These settlers, he says, were absorbed by the Indians, and gave many Norse loans to their languages.
5 In the Hamburger Tageblatt, July 8, 1934, briefed in the American-German Review, Dr. Norbert Zimmer called attention to the curious fact that most of the German place-names of the United States are of Low German origin, though the early German immigration was predominantly from Western, Central and Southern Germany.
6 A run feeding the north branch of the Susquehanna. The Geographic Board warns that it is not to be written Quenshhague, Quineshakony or Quinneshockeny.
1 The name of a brook in New Hampshire. I should add that the Geographic Board abolished it in 1916 and ordered that the brook be called Beaver. Many other Indian names have been similarly displaced. J. H. Trumbull, in his
Indian Names and Places, Etc., In and On the Borders of Connecticut; Hartford, 1881, recorded that the Anchamaunnackkaunack, a pond near Stonington, had become Lake Amos, and that an eminence originally Puckhunkonnuck was Pendleton Hill. In her Letters From the United States, Cuba and Canada; New York, 1856, p. 324, the Hon. Amelia M. Murray was deploring the disappearance of Natchovtashmuck and Nassamasschaick from the map of the Massachusetts Berkshires, and as far back as Sept. 23, 1837, a writer in the New York Mirror was calling Coosawda, Catawba, Tuscaloosa, Talapoosa, etc., “softer, more appropriate and more descriptive” than Johnstown, Jamestown, Millerstown and the like. I am indebted for the last two references to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
2 This monster is reported in Connecticut Past and Present, by Odell Shepard; New York, 1939, p. 100. It is the name of a lake commonly called Webster.
3 The process is well described in The Aleut Language, by Richard Henry Geoghegan; Washington, 1944, p. 87.
4 Stewart adds “or something worse.” See Great Skunk Theory Stands Up, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 12, 1939, p. 14.
5 A History of the Origin of the Place Names in Nine Northwestern States, before cited, pp. 55–56.
1 “The Americans,” said Robert Southey in The Doctor, CV, 1834–47, “have given all sorts of names, excepting fitting ones, to the places which they have settled or discovered.” “Our country,” said Washington Irving in the Knickerbocker Magazine, Aug., 1839, “is deluged with names taken from places in the Old World, and applied to places having no possible affinity or resemblance to their namesakes. This betokens a forlorn poverty of invention, and a second-hand spirit, content to cover its nakedness with the borrowed or cast-off clothes of Europe.” I am indebted here to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
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