From VOICES: Upstate by Varick A. Chittenden

Volume 33
Spring-Summer
2007

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When traveling, I’ve often been curious about the colorful names I’ve run into along the way. But I’m convinced that, like so many other things folkloric, we can find some really good examples right around us.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Varick A. Chittenden is professor emeritus of English at the State University of New York in Canton and executive director of Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY). For the list of place-names in this column, he thanks Mary Smallman and Kelsie Harder, whose diligent study of maps, records, and local talk produced Claims to Name: Toponyms of St. Lawrence County (Utica, New York: North Country Books, 1992). Photo: Martha Cooper

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From Gypsy Lane to Tupper Road to State Highway 310 by Varick A. Chittenden

For Christmas this last year, an old friend couldn’t resist giving me a copy of a book called Passing Gas . . . And Other Towns Along the American Highway. Gas, it turns out, is in the heartland of Kansas. The rest of the book offers profiles of other notable place names, like Left Hand, West Virginia; Embarrass, Illinois; and Rough and Ready, Pennsylvania. In the vastness of America, there are several million names for places—cities, towns, counties, rivers, mountains, roads, and more—that are official. But perhaps millions more are known only to locals, and many of them are already lost to time.

When traveling, I’ve often been curious about the colorful names I’ve run into along the way. But I’m convinced that, like so many other things folkloric, we can find some really good examples right around us. I’ve discovered that Saint Lawrence County, where I’ve lived almost my entire life, is a great source. Said to be the largest county in area in New York and fifth largest east of the Mississippi, there has been plenty of land to settle and names to put upon it.

Right here, there is evidence of all the major categories for naming places: for founders and settlers (Flackville, Ogdensburg, and Hopkinton); for historical and otherwise important persons (Rooseveltown, for Teddy Roosevelt; Fort Jackson, for Andrew Jackson; and Remington Circle, for native son and artist Frederic Remington); and names from faith (Saint Regis and Saint Lawrence, chosen by French priests who established early missions, and numerous Old and New Testament names, including Jerusalem Corners, Jordan River, Galilee, Mount Pisgah—even Sodom). That last one I’d really like to know more about!

There are descriptions of physical geography (Dismal Swamp, Haystack Rock, Lazy River, and Ironsides Island), nods to our richly diverse geology (Iron Mountain Road, Copper Falls, Lead Mine Road, and Pyrites—probably a sardonic reference to “fool’s gold”), and a bounty of references to flora and fauna. There are scores of ponds, lakes, and streams called Trout, Bear, Deer, Buck, or Beaver. There’s Grasshopper Hill, Cranberry Lake, Gooseberry Mountain, Balsam Brook, and Potato Street.

And of course Native American names, so ubiquitous in New York State, are here, too: Oswegatchie, Wanakena, Wyanoke Island, and Chippewa Bay are a few. Podunk seems to have originated as “Amerindian,” and I’m happy to report that we have one.

Perhaps most fun to the curious, however, are those places that locals have given colorful names, with interesting stories attached. Here is a sample of some Saint Lawrence County names:

Bingo Road: Many people attempted to farm here but all failed, so “Bingo!” They were gone. Hardscrabble Road and Pinchgut Road share the same connotations.
California Road: A family on the road announced they were going to California for a better life but never left, so mild derision by the locals followed for years.
Caravan Road and Gypsy Lane: Where itinerant gypsies were allowed to camp.
Eel Weir: A natural dam in a Black Lake outlet, where eels are caught.
Flatiron Street: A wife once threw a flatiron at her husband here.
Horseheaven: An area in the sandbanks along the Grasse River near Canton, where horses were once buried because it was easy to dig graves; more recently the site of the village dump.
Mount Alone: The romantic story is that a mean man married a woman and left her about two weeks later; thereafter, she lived on the mountain alone.
Pest House Road: In the nineteenth century, each town had a “pest house” where locals went when they had communicable diseases or were quarantined.
Pulpit Rock: A seventy-foot–high natural rock formation used as a pulpit by early settlers who held services at the rock.
Slab City: A crossroads hamlet where a large sawmill once operated, producing numerous huge piles of slab wood, the outer layers of wood left after lumber was milled. Usually the bark was left on, and the wood was then cut into short pieces for woodstoves and fireplaces.
Sunday Rock: A forty-three–ton glacial boulder used to mark the limit of formal civilization, beyond which lay the region where only logging crews and hunters ventured. South of this point, it was said that law and Sunday did not exist.
Whiskey Brook: In the old days, when Parishville had a distillery, patrons used to stop to dilute the fiery liquid with some clear sparkling water from this little stream. One day a man dropped his jug and broke it. Another man came along, saw the broken jug, and called the stream Whiskey Brook.

In the last few decades, official American place names have changed considerably. Zip codes make our mail more efficient; 911 emergency numbers make our lives safer and more secure. But Robert Louis Stevenson once said of American names, “There are few poems with a nobler music for the ear, a songful, tuneful land.” Podunk is now 13652. And just around the corner from me, what was once Gypsy Lane was for a while Tupper Road. Now it is State Highway 310. What’s in a name?

Varick Chittenden’s Upstate column was published in Voices Vol. 33, Spring Summer 2007. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.