2 Ehrensperger was born in Indiana and educated at Harvard, where he became Ph.D. in 1921. He later studied at Bonn and at Lund (Sweden) with Eilert Ekwall, editor of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, and the greatest living authority upon the subject. After seven years at Wellesley Ehrensperger went to South Dakota in 1932.
3 Our Southern Highlanders; New York, 1921, pp. 299–304.
4 Smoky Mountains History as Told in Place-Names, Publications of the East Tennessee Historical Society, Vol. VI, 1934, pp. 3–11, and (with Myron H. Avery) The Nomenclature of the Great Smoky Mountains, the same, Vol. IX, 1937, pp. 53–64.
5 Classical Place Names in Tennessee, Word Study, Nov., 1933, pp. 7–8.
6 Place Names in the Cumberland Mountains, American Speech, Dec., 1929, p. 113.
1 Muscle Shoals, not Mussel Shoals, is correct for the rapids and dam on the Tennessee river. The reasons therefor were set forth at length in Why Muscle Shoals?, by Gerard H. Matthes, New York Times (editorial page), May 9, 1926.
2 Terrell (Texas), 1936.
3 Stories in Texas Names, Southwest Review, Jan., 1936, pp. 125–36; April, 1936, pp. 278–94, and July, 1936, pp. 411–17.
4 The History and Geography of Texas as Told in County Names; Austin, 1915; new edition, 1926.
5 For example, Beauty and Humor in Texas Place Names, by Tennessee Farris, Dallas Morning News, Nov. 2, 1930; Around the Plaza, by Jeff Davis, San Antonio Light, June 9, 1936; Firearms and Texas Towns, by W. E. Dancy, American Rifleman, Feb., 1938. A brief note by Artemisia Baer Bryson is in American Speech, June, 1928, p. 436.
6 Origins of Utah Place Names; Salt Lake City, June, 1938; third edition, March, 1940.
7 It is defined therein (Ether II, 3) as meaning a honey bee. A beehive is still the State emblem and appears on the State seal.
8 Whether or not Utah is identical with Eutaw seems to be in doubt. The latter is a frequent place-name in the South, where it commemorates the battle of Eutaw Springs, S. C., fought Sept. 8, 1781.
1 The Rev. Samuel A. Peters (1735–1826), whose General History of Connecticut; London, 1781, is still considered scandalous in that State, claimed to be the sponsor of Vermont. This was in 1768 and he called it Verdmont. His claim appears in his History of the Rev. Hugh Peters; New York, 1807. There is an account of him in Supplement I, pp. 211–12.
2 Virginia County Names: Two Hundred Years of Virginia History; New York, 1908. It was followed by Virginia County Names, by M. P. Robinson, Bulletin of the Virginia State Library, Vol. IX, 1916, pp. 1–283.
3 Topographic Terms in Virginia, American Speech, Feb., pp. 3–38; April, pp. 149–79; Oct., pp. 262–300; Dec., 381–419. These papers were reissued in one volume as American Speech Reprints and Monographs, No. 3; New York, 1940. They will be noticed presently.
4 A master’s thesis on French Place-Names in Virginia, by J. W. Gordon, of the University of Virginia, was noted in American Speech, Feb., 1937, p. 73. The manuscript is in the Virginia room at the university. A brief discussion of the Virginia custom of speaking of counties without adding county to their names, by Atcheson L. Hench, is in American Speech, April, 1944, p. 153.
5 Origin of Washington Geographic Names; Seattle, 1923. The contents of this work were published serially in the Washington Historical Quarterly, 1917–23. Meany also published Indian Geographic Names of Washington; Seattle, 1908.
6 A Geographical Dictionary of Washington, Bulletin of the Washington Geological Survey, No. 17, 1917.
7 Some of the founders of West Virginia wanted to call it Kanawha, but in the constitutional convention of 1862 West Virginia won by 30 votes to 9. Western Virginia, Allegheny and Augusta received two each. Columbia and New Virginia were also proposed, but they got no votes.
1 Geographical Names in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, before cited.
2 Origin and Meaning of Wisconsin Place-Names, With Special Reference to Indian Nomenclature, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters; Vol. XIV, No. 1, 1903, pp. 16–39.
3 Not yet published at the time of the present writing. It will run to 1500 entries. The Federal Writers’ Project produced a 50-page mimeographed pamphlet, Wisconsin Place Name Legends, but the edition was exhausted before I could collar a copy.
4 Wyoming Stream Names, by Dee Linford; Cheyenne, 1944.
5 Some Wyoming Place Names; Laramie, 1942. An enlargement of a paper read before the Western Folklore Conference at Denver, July 9, 1942.
6 It has issued no reports since its nineteenth in 1930. I am indebted here to Mr. P. E. Palmer, its secretary.
1 Le Petit Journal, Montreal, Nov. 22, 1931.
2 The Quebec Geographic Board has changed Makamik to Macamic but the Geographic Board of Canada sticks to Makamik.
3 Les Noms Géographiques de la Province de Québec; Lévis (Quebec), 1906.
4 His monographs appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada from 1895 onward.
5 Place-Names of Newfoundland, Canadian Geographical Journal, Dec., 1944, pp. 255–63. Keenleyside notes the refreshing absence of Centervilles, Fairviews and New Londons from the Newfoundland map, and praises the bold picturesqueness of many of its geographical names, e.g., Empty Basket, Breakheart Point, Milliner’s Arm, Dog Pen, Hog’s Nose, Lord and Lady, Burnt Arm, Iron Skull, Blow-me-Down, Ha Ha, Stepaside, Cuckold’s Cove, Pick Eyes, Horse Chops, St. Jones, Femme, and Our Lady’s Bubbies (two islets in the Strait of Belle Isle). He protests against the Philistinism which has induced the Nomenclature Board to change Maggotty Cove to Hoylestown and Mother Hicks to Regina.
6 The Origin and Meaning of Place Names in Canada; Toronto, 1930. This work contains a bibliography.
7 British Columbia Coast Names, 1592–1906; Ottawa, 1909. Some of the Indian names of the British Columbia coast are formidable, e.g., Ahwhichaolto, Coqueisenejigh, Nequiltpaalis and Incomappbeaux.
8 Indian Place Names in Ontario; Toronto, 1930.
1 Gananoque: the Name and Its Origin; Aouan Island, 1942. Gananoque is the name of a river, a lake and a town in southern Ontario. Eames traces it to an Iroquois term meaning “the door to the flint at the mountain.” He records 42 different spellings, including Gaunuhnauqueeng and Guansignougua, and in a mimeographed appendix he adds 13 more.
2 Some Historical Names and Places of the Canadian Northwest; Winnipeg, 1885.
3 Nova Scotia Place Names; North Sydney, 1922.
4 I am indebted here to Dr. David Robertson, president of Goucher College, who kindly gave me access to a letter from Lawrence Burpee, of the International Joint Commission, Ottawa.
5 Moor and fen are in Beowulf, and the NED traces combe to 770, heath to c. 1000, weald to 1018, dell to c. 1220 and fell to c. 1300.
6 Other examples are in Dutch Place-Names in Eastern New York, by A. E. H. Swaen, American Speech, June, 1930, p. 400, and Dialectal Evidence in the Place-Names of Eastern New York, by Edward E. Hale, American Speech, Feb., 1930 pp. 154–67.
7 Others are in Geographical Terms From the Spanish, by Mary Austin, American Speech, Oct., 1933, pp. 7–10.
8 Says J. D. Whitney in Names and Places; Cambridge, 1888, p. 77: “A considerable number of Indian words form all or part of various proper names, and have thus become quite familiar to us, as, for instance, sipi, minne, squam, kitchi and many others, but no one of all these words has been generalized so as to have become applicable to any class or form of scenic feature.”
1 Lieut.-Col. F. G. Potts, of Mt. Pleasant, S. C.; private communication, Jan. 20, 1945.
2 The most exhaustive study of American topographical names is in Topographic Terms in Virginia, by George Davis McJimsey, before cited. McJimsey traces many terms beyond the first dates given in the DAE, and adds a full bibliography. See also Geographical Terms in the Far West, by Edward E. Hale, Dialect Notes, Vol. VI, Part IV, 1932, pp. 217–34, likewise with a bibliography; Nomenclature of Stream-Forks on the West Slope of the Sierra Nevada, by George R. Stewart, American Speech, Oct., 1939, pp. 19
1–97; and What is Named? – Towns, Islands, Mountains, Rivers, Capes, by the same, University of California Publications in English, No. 14; Berkeley, 1943, pp. 223–32. American Speech prints frequent papers on place-names, but there is no journal specially devoted to the subject, and nothing equivalent to the English Place Name Society, founded in 1922 and skillfully guided until his death by Sir Allen Mawer (1879–1942). In Germany, Holland and Scandinavia the study of place-names has been long pursued. Germany has a journal called the Zeitschrift für Ortsnamenforschung, first issued in 1925, and Sweden has Namn och Bygd, founded in 1913.
4. OTHER PROPER NAMES
The literature dealing with other American proper names is somewhat extensive, and deals, inter alia, with the names given to apartment-houses, bungalows, cemeteries, churches, colleges, theatres, warships, merchant ships, newspapers, magazines, express trains, eating-houses, bars, night clubs, station-wagons, political factions, athletic teams, telephone exchanges, quilts and domestic animals. In most instances it may seem to the casual observer that names are chosen arbitrarily and even irrationally, but investigation shows that in some cases well defined systems are followed, planned carefully to avoid or get rid of difficulties.
That used by the New York Telephone Company in naming the telephone exchanges of Manhattan Island was described at length in 1941 by Pitt F. Carl, Jr., one of the assistant vice-presidents of the company.1 The first New York telephone directory, issued in 1878, did not show any exchanges at all, but only the names of subscribers, then 241 in number. A subscriber who wanted to talk to another simply asked for him by name and address. But as the number of subscribers increased this method broke down, and it was necessary to give each subscriber a number, and a little while later the numbers had to be apportioned to exchanges, each of which had to have a name. The first chosen were familiar neighborhood names, e.g., Gramercy, Chelsea, Murray Hill and Madison Square, but soon these ran out, and the telephone engineers had to discover or invent new ones. This was not the easy business that it may have seemed to the layman, for every new name had to differ clearly from every name already in use, and in addition had to be “easy to read, easy to say, easy to hear, and easy to remember.”
It sooned turned out that the number of such names, whether borrowed or invented, was anything but unlimited. In fact, long experiment showed that there were only about 240 of them. When 200 had been put to use it became necessary to devise a new plan, and this was effected in December, 1930, by adding numbers to the exchange names, so that Plaza, for example, was divided into Plaza-1, Plaza-2, and so on. Inasmuch as the usual four-digit number had to follow, this had the disadvantage of giving every subscriber a number of five digits, but telephone users soon got used to them, and after a little while they caused no trouble. They showed the merit of greatly facilitating the introduction of dial telephones. The subscriber using such a telephone dials the first two letters of the name of the exchange. This would have presented an almost insuperable difficulty under the old system, for not a few of the 240 eligible exchange names began with the same two letters, but the addition of numbers multiplied every existing exchange by ten, and so disposed of that difficulty. Mr. Carl thus concluded:
To sum up, the selection of central-office names for use in a large city is a major engineering problem. The names in use include as large a supply of neighborhood and historic names as fall within the technical requirements for calling either by dial or by voice. They are survivors from among thousands of names which, for one reason or another, fail to meet all the complex requirements of service for a great city.1
Apartment-house names show a rich efflorescence in the United States, and many gaudy and almost incredible examples are to be found. Those of New York City have been studied at length by Arthur Minton.2 He finds that of the 5500 apartment-houses listed in the Polk directories of the five boroughs about a fourth have names. This proportion was probably much higher at an earlier time, for there has been a movement against names of late, chiefly on the ground of their frequent absurdity, and it is now fashionable to live in a house, however huge, that shows only a street address. In the 1947 Manhattan telephone directory more than 1000 such nameless apartments were listed. Mr. Minton finds that in the remainder (including those of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Richmond) the names in favor follow a few banal patterns. Something between a quarter and a third include the words Arms or Court, and a great many of the rest include Hall, Manor, Towers, Gardens, Terrace, House, Chambers, Plaza or Gables. Sometimes two designations are combined, as in Chelsea Court Tower. “For the most part,” says Minton, “these generic elements are obviously derived from English usage – Arms, for example, from English inn names, and Court, Hall and Manor from names of English dwellings and estates. In them, as even more markedly in other elements, Americans are seen turning to British life for connotations of prestige and security.” The non-generic parts of the names, he continues, come mainly from five sources – the names of adjacent streets and localities, personal names, those carrying historical or romantic associations, those of “natural features of the landscape,” and those coming out of a sheer exuberance of fancy. Of the first class, Kingsbridge Vanity Court (in the Kingsbridge section of Brooklyn) and Parkside Arms (on Parkside avenue) offer examples; of the second, Florence Towers, Mary Arms and the Bertha; of the third, Caledonia, Ivanhoe, Jeffersonian, Cinderella Hall and Mona Lisa; of the fourth, Ocean Towers, Hillcrest and Superview; and of the fifth Shergold, El-Mora, Dalmac and Empec Court. The names based on personal names show some lush incongruities, e.g., Kaplan Court, Rossoff Terrace, Leibman Manor and Hochroth Arms.1 But the strongest visible tendency is toward British-sounding names, and there are many examples in -leigh and -moor, the former of which was once put to heavy use in the naming of second-rate suburbs. Says Minton:
To judge by … the large and ever-growing number of British and British-sounding names,… New Yorkers are rabidly Anglophile. A recently built apartment-house or “development” (that is, group of apartment-houses) – if it is named – is likely to be blessed with a name that pretends to some aura of Albion. Among the tony examples are: Oxford Knolls, Dorchester Gardens, Balfour Arms, Tilbury Court, Chiselhurst, Rossmore, Sherwood Hall, Windsor Castle.… The names Windsor and Georgian occur eleven times in Polk’s lists, and Tudor sixteen times. Brooklyn has an English Village. The residents of Tudor Manor, a large Manhattan apartment group, live without stifling in units called the Cloisters, Essex, Haddon Hall, Hardwick Hall, the Hermitage and the Manor. Another Manhattan nest bears the promising name of Dartmoor.
The names of American hotels show measurably less yielding to Anglomania, though in New York there are still some evidences of it, e.g., Berkshire, Broadmoor, Clarendon, Cornish Arms, Cumberland, Devon, Gladstone, Oxford, Piccadilly, Prince George, St. Albans, Stratford House and Arms, Surrey and Sussex. There was a time when American hotels commonly were named after the owners or managers, e.g., Astor, Gilsey, Vanderbilt (all in New York), Parker (Boston), Willard (Washington), Rennert, Barnum’s (both Baltimore), Hollenden (Cleveland), Palmer (Chicago), Galt (Louisville), Delevan (Albany) and Burnett (Cincinnati), but that fashion has passed, and most of those of more recent construction take their names from history or mere fancy. Of late a number, imitating the apartment-houses, have abandoned names altogether, and are known by their street numbers. When a new hotel in some large city makes a conspicuous success, it is common for its name to be borrowed in smaller places: there are Plazas, Astors and Ritzes all over the hinterland. Up to 1900 or thereabout many an American hotel used House after its name, but that fashion has gone out, and when House now appears in the United States it is usually applied to an apartment-house or an office-building, in imitation of English usage.1
The English fashion for giving names to individual dwelling-houses has never got lodgment in this country, save in the case of country residences with more or less extensive grounds,2 but the bungalows in Summer colonies are often given names, sometimes pun
s or satirical misspellings. Ida M. Mellen, in 1927, listed a number of specimens encountered “on a sand bar off the New York coast,”3 e.g., Wendoweeat, Jusamere Home, Camp Rest-a-bit, Hatetoleaveit, U Kan Kum Inn, Unous, Kumhavarest, Villa-de-Luxe, Fallen Arches, Kamp Takiteze, You Know Me Al, and Cat’s Meow. To these, in 1944, Mrs. Edith Morgan King added many more, dividing them into classes as follows:1
1. Names of the owners in reverse, e.g., Nitsua (Austin), Elyod (Doyle) and Notluf Farm (Fulton).2
2. Conjugal combinations, e.g., Virma (Virginia-Martin), Ludor (Louis-Dorothy) and Wiso (William-Sophia).
3. Whimsies and puns, e.g., Suitsme, Welcomyn, Biltover, Dunrenten, Rope’s End, Sutzanna, Upson Downs, Headacres and Holme Run.
4. Bogus Indian names, e.g., Wa-a-wa, Waywayanda and Caplunk.
Other explorers have added Hop Inn, Dew Drop Inn, Moneysunk, Dunhuntin,3 Uncle Tom’s, Kum-on-Up, Nodaway, G-E-M, Laff-a-Lot, Weona Place, Linger Longer, Lotta Joy, O-So-Kozy, Bide-a-Wee, Look See, Here-I-Is, Ken-Tuck-You-Inn, Gid Inn, We-Blu-Inn, Klimb Inn, Curl Inn and Snussle Inn.4 The revival of inn as a punning substitute for in in some of these names restores a word that threatened to be lost to the American language. Before the Revolution inns were relatively rare in the colonies save in the larger towns, but with the movement into the wilderness that began after the Treaty of Paris they multiplied enormously. Lewis H. Chrisman says5 that after the completion of the turnpike from Philadelphia to Lancaster, in 1794, “almost every mile had an inn of some kind.” During the same year Congress passed an act for their regulation. They all bore names and their signs commonly showed images of the persons, animals or objects after whom or which they were named. As towns grew up about the more prosperous of them their names were commonly transferred thereto, and that was the origin of some curious town names noted in Section 3 of this chapter, e.g., Bird-in-Hand, King of Prussia,6 Red Lion and Blue Ball in Pennsylvania, and Bishop’s Head, Rising Sun and Cross Keys in Maryland.1
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