American Pie: A Burg By Any Other Name
"In my opinion, the hidden beauty of place names in America lies in the counties,'' says John Merchant. He relishes county names such as Bertie, Duplin, Catawba, Caswell, Chenango, Delaware, Sierra, Socorro, Piscataquis and Androscoggin.
Most of all though John treasures the mellow names of English villages and towns - Potter Heigham, Wroxham, Flamborough, Wintringham, Ramsbottom, Feniscowles, Bedminster, Lullsgate - names which march back through time.
The fascinating names of towns and villages in England have always delighted me. One could make a fairly accurate guess about the origins of a place by its name. The Roman period, the Anglo Saxon period, the Norman period and so on. Thus we have Sutton Hoo, Sax Mundham, Ashby–de-la-Zouch, Beauchamp, all the Thorpes etc. It seems that antipathy towards Latin was as strong in the past as it is now, because few, if any of the Roman names survive in their original form.
Place names that derive from their reason for existence are also pleasant on the ear: Bath, Flaxpool, Chandler’s Ford, Broughton Mills and the rest. Then there are the hundreds of whimsical names - Farleigh Wallop, Peasemore World’s End, Golden Balls (yes really), and Bumbles Green. Many of the names are like old stone steps. Changing circumstances, a lack of written records, and mispronunciation over the years have worn away the sharp edges of the words and smoothed the sounds they make when uttered. Lilstock. Toulton, Gomshore, Shere,Theydon Bois.
Before I came to live in the USA, I was often amused by the way the Americans I knew would speak of places in England and Europe, as in: “Paris, France,” “London, England,” “Rome, Italy” etc. My naïve reaction was, where else do they think these places are? Only when I came to live in this country did I realize that a great many English and European towns of note have counterparts in the US. So it is very important for Americans to make the distinction between the original city and Rome in New York; or Paris in Texas and five other states; London in Kentucky plus 4 other states, and so on.
Looking around the North American map, it strikes me that very little, if any, imagination was ever applied to the naming of places. The early European settlers were confined to the north east by the Appalachian Ridge, which proved to be an insurmountable barrier from Maine in the north, 2000 miles to Georgia in the south, until the discovery of the Delaware Water Gap. Before that, most large scale population movements towards the west, ground to a halt in Apalachia, or the Blue Ridge Mountains. The pioneers were mostly Dutch, Scottish, English and German mercenaries and other remnants of the War of Independence.
When it came to the naming of places where they settled, it seemed they could do no better than either bestowing the name of the city of their birth, or giving it the name of some place that it resembled. Very quickly, the English expended most of their home-town names in the states of Maine and New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut. About the only imagination they applied was to prefix the name with “New.” So we have New London, New Bedford, New Preston, not to mention New York, which under the Dutch had been Niew Amsterdam. A strange exception is Old Lyme in Connecticut.
Other than that, it was a matter of just duplicating one’s birthplace - Portsmouth, Bristol, Gloucester, Derby and the rest. Once they ran out of “back home” names, they were apparently at a loss to create worthy new ones, and the result is, to say the least, uninspiring. We have Circleville, Newburgh, Middletown, Glassboro, McMinnville, Baker City, Lewistown and the remainder of the drab collection. Perhaps a saving grace is the later use of Native American names: Pocono, Naugatuck, Poquetanuk, Cinnaminson and Conshohocken among them.
In my opinion, the hidden beauty of place names in America lies in the counties. Other than the county they happen to live in, or perhaps a couple of adjoining ones, most of the population is unaware of county names. The only reason I became as aware of them as I am, is that much of the sales analysis I did, as part of my various jobs, was county based. So my dreary statistics were enlivened by counties like Bertie, Duplin, Catawba, Caswell, Chenango, Delaware, Sierra and Socorro, Piscataquis and Androscoggin.
Then hurricane Katrina came along and peeled back the layers of obscurity from the blighted Louisiana counties of Terrabonne, Lafourche and Plaquemines, Evangeline, Tangipahoa and others. But with all that, it will take a lot of history and possibly turmoil before the names of towns and counties in America mellow into the magic, golden names of the English countryside, if they ever do. Potter Heigham, Wroxham, Flamborough, Wintringham, Ramsbottom, Feniscowles, Bedminster, Lullsgate. The names march back through time.
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