Place Names in the U.S.A.

Contents

1 Introduction

2 The Sixteenth Century
2.1 The Spanish Explorers in the East
2.2 The English Explorers

3 The Seventeenth Century
3.1 The English Settlers
3.2 The Dutch Settlers
3.3 The Swedish Settlers
3.4 The Defeat of the Dutch
3.5 The French Explorers
3.6 European Encounters in America
3.7 The Quakers

4 The Eighteenth Century
4.1 Conquest of the West
4.2 The Spanish Explorers in the West
4.3 Difficulties of Pronunciation
4.4 The Birth of a Nation

5 The Nineteenth Century
5.1 Classical Renascence
5.2 Foreign Influence and New Patterns
5.3 New Territory
5.4 The Deep South and the Far West
5.5 Before the Civil War
5.6 After the Civil War

6 The Twentieth Century
6.1 Closing of the Frontier
6.2 Alaska and Hawai‘i

7 Epilog

8 Bibliography

1 Introduction

Place names, or toponyms, may represent the best-known specimens of the American variant of English. Like other “Americanisms,” they may be the product of composition, derivation, or borrowing from another language. A glance at a map shows that they, too, have their regularities and patterns of regional distribution, and they are able to provide important clues to the history of the nation. For those who take an in-depth look, they tell stories about the origin of those who gave the names, their hopes and beliefs, and of persons they wanted to honor.

The scope of this paper only permits the presentation of a sample of toponyms to illustrate some of the most influential processes of name formation, and it will be limited to names of settlements, even though similar processes were at work in naming natural topographical features (such as rivers, forests, mountains – mostly before the settlements established in a particular region) and administrative units (counties, states – mostly after the settlements). For this purpose, a chronological account seemed most appropriate, and as a consequence, certain regions may be discussed at different places throughout the text.

2 The Sixteenth Century

2.1 The Spanish Explorers in the East

Only two decades after Christopher Columbus, Juan Ponce de León sailed from Puerto Rico to the northwest and reached what is now the southeastern part of the continental United States. On 2 April 1513, he gave this nation the first name that should survive unchanged for at least another five hundred years. It was a week after the Easter of Flowers, and since Ponce de León imagined the land to be flowering and prosperous, he called it Terra Florida – the “flowering land.”

This incident not only marks the beginning of recorded name-giving in the United States but is also the first example for one of the most pervasive non-English influences, namely Spanish. These place names now number over 2,000, stretching across the “Sunbelt” from coast to coast.

2.2 The English Explorers

English explorers, notably Sir Walter Raleigh, came some seventy years later and landed further to the north. They adopted Amerindian nomenclature, and so did many settlers who followed in their footsteps, although pronunciation was changed to suit the English tongue. On occasion, folk-etymology gave an Indian name a completely new meaning: Moskitu-auke, for instance, meaning “grass-land,” was changed to Mosquito Hawk, another word for “dragonfly.”

3 The Seventeenth Century

3.1 The English Settlers

In April 1607, the first British colonists arrived in the new world. On May 14th, their first settlement was established and named Jamestown, in honor of the King. The incorporation of proper names into toponyms – especially those of discoverers, founders, or members of the Royal Family – became a common pattern in the early days of name formation. More and more “barbarous” (and difficult-to-pronounce) Indian names were replaced by either new creations or simply by English place names from the “old country,” such as the famous Plymouth, which probably bore this name already before the Pilgrims landed there in 1620. As a matter of fact, as early as 1630, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that familiar names of England be transferred to New England, which is what happened, for example, in the case of Boston. Frequently, the English town where the minister or other dignitaries of the new American settlement had been born was chosen as the namesake, in other cases the name was selected for its descriptive suitability, as with Medfield (“mead[ow]-field”).

South of New England, the Virginians – who had no name-giving systems imposed on them by their government – invented a variety of fanciful names for their “plantations.”

3.2 The Dutch Settlers

Close to the English settlements, the Dutch had founded a colony of their own at approximately the same time. They called their main plantation Nieuw Amsterdam, and in similar fashion, many other places in the Low Countries lent their names to places in Nieuw Nederland, like Breukelyn (Brooklyn) and Haarlem (Harlem).

Indian names were “Dutchized,” giving birth to Hackensack, Poughkeepsie, and Schaehechstede, which – unpronounceable to the English – later was anglicized into Schenectady.

The Dutch, too, used personal names. One of their rivers was called Bronck’s Rivier, and Jonkheer Adrian van Donck’s colony de Jonkheer’s for short – these names are preserved today in the Bronx and Yonkers, respectively.

3.3 The Swedish Settlers

In 1638, the Swedes followed and took possession of a piece of land they called Ny Sverige. They showed even less imagination than those who preceded them and only gave the existing names – be they Indian, English, or Dutch – a touch of Swedish in spelling and pronunciation.

In 1655, the Swedes were defeated by the Dutch under Pieter Stuyvesant, but the early Scandinavian settlers remained on their land, and so did their names.

3.4 The Defeat of the Dutch

In 1664, an English fleet attacked Nieuw Amsterdam and forced Stuyvesant to surrender. As an outward sign of their victory over the Dutch, the British instantly changed the name of their principal city to New York.

3.5 The French Explorers

Under the Sun King, France had risen to great power, and the French – who already had colonies in today’s Canada, Nouveau France – tried to extend their territory further to the south. However, as they were all more or less acquainted with the Indian languages, they often preserved their original place names. One of these names was the Algonquin word for “onion place” (for the wild onion growing there), which the French wrote down as Chicagou. Although this name is of Indian origin, the peculiar pronunciation of the initial sound “ch” (as /ʃ/, not /tʃ/) bears witness to the language of those who first gave the name its written form.

But French place names have not always survived to the present day as intact as this one. The tribal name of the Moingouena Indians inspired explorers to call a river Rivière des Moingouenas, but this was soon shortened to Rivière des Moings. To the French, this short form sounded like “river of the monks,” and it was soon spelled accordingly: Des Moines. The letters have not changed since, even after the name was applied to the town that is now the capital of Iowa, but the modern pronunciation has little in common with the French one (cf. 4.3).

Robert, Sieur de la Salle, moved further south than any of his countrymen before him. He followed the Mississippi River to its mouth near the territory of Florida, which had been explored by the Spaniards.

3.6 European Encounters in America

Early in the 16th century, those who had come to México in the wake of Cortés had begun to push north. They named and renamed places in this area, and the pattern most obvious to this very day is the dedication of their discoveries to saints, in many cases to the saint of the day on which the expedition reached that particular site.

These explorers, after sailing up the coast of what they called California (comprising Baja and Alta, or Lower and Upper), moved from the Pacific inland, i.e. to the east. Towards the end of the 17th century, they were bound to reach the territory that LaSalle had claimed for the French Crown and – in honor of his King – had called Louisiane.

When this encounter occurred in 1691, almost any part of what now constitutes the continental United States was claimed by at least one of the three great European powers.

As English influence spread to settlements already established by the French or Dutch and given names the English found hard to pronounce, those names were sometimes translated. Especially in the case of Dutch names, the “translations” frequently relied on guesswork rather than knowledge. Since these two Germanic languages were closely related, they often had similar words for the same thing – or so the English thought. Inevitably, they were frequently mislead by faux amis. And while the English were trying to exterminate un-English names in one place, new ones arose elsewhere, and from another source.

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