George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945, 1958, 1967: dated in some of its language and assumptions, but still the most inviting general introduction to this topic).
George R. Stewart, Names on the Globe (1975)
George R. Stewart, American Place-Names: A Concise and Selective Dictionary for the Cotinental United States of America (1970)
Robert G. Gard & L. G. Sorden, The Romance of Wisconsin Placenames (1968)
Edward Callary, Place Names of Wisconsin (2016)
Frederick G. Cassidy, Dane County Place-Names (1947) (available online through UW Library)
William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (2004)
Virgil J. Vogel, Indian Names on Wisconsin's Map (1992)
Margaret Gelling, Place-Names in the Landscape (1984): classic study of the ways British place names reflect the landscape they label
Eilert Ekwall, A Concise Dictionary of English Place-names (4th ed., 1960): longstanding reference work on this subject, with helpful introductory essay
Victor Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (2004): the new standard reference work on this subject.
Fred McDonald & Julia Cresswell, The Guinness Book of British Place Names (1993): lively, fun, accessible overview of the subject, well organized for browsing (out of print)
C. M. Matthews, Place Names of the English-Speaking World (1972): accessible popular overview of English place-naming practices world-wide.
Charles Whynne-Hammond, English Place-Names Explained: Their Origins and Meaning (2005): brief, accessible introduction with wide-ranging explanations and examples of different categories of place names.
Mark Monmonier, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (2006): explores the persistence of racist and sexist names in the American landscape, and efforts to try to expunge them
On the origin of Madison's street names, see:
http://www.historicmadison.org/Madison%27s%20Past/Street%20Names/streetnames.html
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS304Today's lecture considers names on the landscape. Place names are among the most interesting and powerful documents we have for exploring changes to landscape over time.
Start with this 1890 topographical quadrangle map of Madison. Topographical maps like these (users of these maps often refer to them as "topos" or quadrangles" or "quads"), and especially the practice of trying to standardize the place names they record, owe a debt to Henry Gannett (1846-1914) of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
Gannett contributed to crucial materials for this course in a number of ways: Gannett's were the statistical maps of U.S. population density that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was looking at when, in 1893, he concluded that the U.S. western frontier had "closed."
But for our purposes today, Gannett is important because he lobbied for the creation of a new U.S. Board on Geographic Names, established in 1890, to collect and standardize place names. You'll find its current website at
http://geonames.usgs.gov,
where you can download its entire database of U.S. place names for any statistical or cartographic analysis you might wish to perform on them.
Gannett also authored The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1902), which you can download here:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0258/report.pdf.
It was the first major compilation of place names for the United States, along with (sometimes inaccurate) analyses of how those names originated. It helped launch the serious study of this subject in the U.S..
You don't need to remember all of the following, but the lecture gave a list of Gannett's very significant contributions to American geography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which go well beyond the study of place names:
Henry Gannett,
“Father of the Quadrangle Map”
1871-79: served as mapmaker for Ferdinand Hayden’s survey of Yellowstone and area
1879: among those lobbying for new U.S. Geological Society (USGS)
1880: served under Clarence King as geographer of 1880 Census, pioneered the use of thematic statistical maps
1882: began process of having USGS produce topographic quadrangle maps
1882-96: Chief Geographer of USGS
1888: helped found National Geographic Society
1890, 1900: served as chief geographer for Censuses of 1890 and 1900 (his statistical maps were the basis for Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis)
1896: last year at USGS, introduced benchmark as fixed points with known elevations in the landscape
1904: among the founders of American Association of Geographers (AAG)
It's important to remember that when we try to trace the origins of any place name, there is lots of misinformation making claims that simply aren't true. Gannett's 1902 volume tells us that "Wisconsin" was "a Sauk Indian word having reference to holes in the banks of a stream," which is factually incorrect. This should remind you that origin stories about place-names are themselves a form of myth and folktale--perhaps inaccurate, but interesting in their own right because they record people's beliefs about place names even when those beliefs lack factual grounding. As scholars of place names, it is important to pay close attention to local folklore, storytelling, and "antiquarian" topics that you might otherwise dismiss.
Many place names have many stories explaining their origins, and to the extent that people believe those stories, they function as elements in the remembered histories of landscape, even though they also need to be scrutinized critically for their historical inaccuracies.
If you're interested in a recent summary of what place name scholars now believe to be true about the origins of Wisconsin's name, see this web page on the Wisconsin Historical Society website:
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Content.aspx?dsNav=N:4294963828-4294963805&dsRecordDetails=R:CS3663
It does a nice job of exemplifying how complex the task of tracing the history of a place name can sometimes be.
Studying place names can reveal fascinating origin stories: take, for example, Frederick G. Cassidy's Dane County Place-Names (1947), which represents a far more rigorous effort to trace the histories of place names of the county in which Madison is located. Cassidy traces the origins of the name "Lake Mendota" to a suggestion from a Madison resident named Frank Hudson in 1849. What we now call Lake Mendota had been known to local residents as "Fourth Lake" since the 1820s, but the name "Lake Mendota" gained popularity both because its perceived beauty when spoken, and because it evoked associations with Native American legends—even if not local Native legends. Even though people probably now imagine that the name of the lake was original to the native peoples who once lived here, Mendota in fact is a Dakota word (mdó-te) meaning "a confluence of rivers," which supplied name of the village of Mendota, Dakota County, in Minnesota...and Frank Hudson based his proposed name for Madison's largest lake on the name of that village because he liked the way it sounded.
All of this suggests the need to be very careful about taking place names at face value. This is especially true of Native American place names in the United States, which were often recorded or proposed by English-speakers who didn't actually know the languages from which such names ultimately derived. The state names "Wyoming" and "Oregon," for instance, derive from native names that have essentially nothing to do with the places they label, with complex linguistic distortions involved in the decisions to assign them to those states.
Studying place names is not just an exercise in understanding how past people have thought about a place, but can also help us trace the historical collisions of language, cultures, and empires. For example, 200 to 300 different Native American languages underlie place names we use in the U.S. today. This makes place names complicated and challenging as historical documents. (For some standard references on U.S. and Wisconsin place names based on Indian languages, see the list of Suggested Readings above.)
The formal study of place names is called "toponymy" and such names are themselves sometimes called "toponyms," but we'll stick with the informal "place names." This lecture owes a great debt to Dick Ringler, English and Scandanavian Studies professor at UW-Madison who taught a course on "The Anglo Saxons" and was my most important teacher and mentor as a an undergraduate. You can read (or watch or listen to) my homage to this wonderful teacher in the second half of my presidential address to the American Historical Association in 2012: http://www.williamcronon.net/aha-writings.html
As Ringler argued, and as the next section of this lecture will model, we can learn a lot about past places and landscapes by studying English place names, which have been studied more rigorously and comprehensively than any other such names. The tools for English place-name study (see the Suggested Readings above) are unquestionably the best in the world. So let's spend some time looking at the British Isles to get a sense of how powerful place names can be as historical documents. (Remember too that many English place-names were transferred from the British Isles to North America, so if you want to understand their original meanings, you need to look at their origins on the far side of the Atlantic.)
Pay attention to the types of questions we ask and the different insights gained from studying place names. Thinking about how places in England got their names can give you tools for thinking about how places get named everywhere else in the world.
The English language is itself a historical document of repeated invasion, colonization, displacement, conquest, and empire: the accretion of linguistic elements from different historical moments and the result of myriad collisions any hybridzations of different cultures.
Starting with the Neolithic Era, we can trace the following waves of invasion that shaped the English language:
The result of all these invasions and colonizations is that the English language we speak today is a complex historical document of these many different cultural and linguistic traditions. For example, many of the 1-syllable words you use for animals you eat ("pig" or "cow") tend to be Anglo-Saxon; many of the 2-syllable words for foods you cook and the techniques you use for cooking them typically derive from Norman French ("cuisine"). An interesting consequence is that English has many of Anglo-Saxon/French word pairs in which the names for animals originated in Old English, whereas the names of the meats we prepare in the kitchen from those animals (meats eaten by French-speaking Norman lords) originated in French: cow/beef, swine/pork, pig/pork, sheep/mutton, and deer/venison all exemplify this pattern.]
So what can we learn by combining a knowledge of British history and the history of the English language with a study of British place names?
Streets, forts, mining areas promulgated in the Roman-Celtic landscape. This is nicely exemplified by the town of Chester: -chester as a suffix (as in Leicester, Winchester, Dorchester, etc.) comes from the Latin castra, which means camp or fortification. Thus, by learning the history of place names we learn that the first cities in Britain were early Roman army forts that grew into larger towns.
In approximately the 4th century C.E., Angles in the north and Saxons in the south captured the eastern British Isles. By the 7th century C.E. of this Anglo-Saxon invasion, we see a number of kingdoms and many place names in the eastern portion of the British Isles with Anglo-Saxon names (whereas in Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland Romano-Celtic names persist). By the 8th century, Viking invasions meant that the region in the east of the British Isles, "The Danelaw" (where Danish law prevailed), began to accumulate Norse place names akin to names in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. For instance, the suffix -by, -bie in English place names comes from Old Norse for yard, courtyard, farmhouse, tilled field; the suffix -thorpe comes from Old Norse an outlying farm settlement. Thus, by studying place names we can map the areas of Viking dominance and work out a geography of the cultural groups dominating different part of the British Isles more a thousand years ago.
Following the 1066 Norman Conquest, the takeover of Anglo-Saxon England by the Norman French meant that French became the language of the ruling elite. English remained a fundamentally Germanic language in its underlying syntax, but during the next three centuries the language acquired many French words (while its syntax became much simpler compared with modern German, losing the case declensions that typify Latin and most Germanic languages). The Normans didn't rename many places; they merely changed the pronunciation of many place names.
In 1086, William the Conquerer called for the creation of Domesday Book, a tax roll that meticulously surveyed the taxable wealth, including landholdings and livestock, of all of William's English possessions. For us today, it serves as an extraordinarily rich document of the 11th-century landscape: by studying the Domesday Book and the many place names it contains, we can work out the distribution and variety not just of settlements, but of landforms and vegetation types present in Britain almost a thousand years ago! The great English historical geographer H. C. Darby (1909-1992) spent much of his career exploring the ways Domesday Book could be used for this kind of analysis.
One strategy for using place names and the Domesday book is to burrow down from the national scale to the county scale: into specific counties and then to specific local place names. For example, do places that are wooded today have wooded names, or is this forest relatively recent? One of the stories that Domesday records is the long-term deforestation of England (along with the rest of Europe from Neolithic times forward) and the spread of livestock, cropland, and pasture. By comparing Domesday Book place names with the landscape today, we can glimpse how the landscape has changed over the past millennium.
Domesday Book, church registers, and other local archives are rich documents for studying place names in Britain. The English Place-Name Society, founded in 1923, has produced an extraordinary body of scholarship:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/epns/
For those of us interested in landscape history, the work of Margaret Gelling (1924-2009), who published her classic Place-Names in the Landscape in 1984 and who served as President of the English Place-Name Society from 1986-1998, is especially valuable.
Here are some common place-name elements that often appear in place names here in the United States. Notice that as people's forget and cease to understand the original languages in which particular place names were created, the original meanings of the names are lost and come to seem arbitrary. All of the place name elements below were originall meaningful when English place names were first created from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse roots in the 6th through 11th centuries, but few of us remember those meanings today.
Examples: -ay, y, ey: island beck: stream berg, berry: hill (cf. “iceberg”) bourne, bern: large brook or stream bury, borough, brough, burgh: fortified enclosure by, bie: settlement, village (Old Norse) caster, chester, cester, ceter: camp, fortification (from Latin castra) cot, cott: cottage, small building field: open land, forest clearing ford, forth: ford, river crossing foss, force: waterfall (Old Norse) ham: farm, homestead, settlement kirk: church (Old Norse) -lea, ley, leigh, leah: a forest clearing mere: lake, pool minster: large church or monastery -pool: harbor -port: port, harbor stan: stone, stony -stead: place, enclosed pasture streat, street: road (Roman) -thorp, thorpe: secondary settlement (ON) -thwaite: forest clearing with dwelling -tun, ton: enclosure, estate, homestead weald, wold: high woodland -wick, wich, wych, wyke: place, settlement -worth, worthy, wardine: enclosure
By mapping out the distribution of some of these elements, we can gain insight into the natural features, land-use practices, and settlement patterns that characterized the British Isles many centuries ago. For an excellent collection of place-name maps that illustrate this point, see Keith Briggs's website at
http://keithbriggs.info/English_placename_element_distribution.html
In the U.S., resources for studying place names are nowhere near as sophisticated as in the British Isles, but that's partly because so many of our place names are so much more recent (with the exception of some Native American names, the study of which requires special care), and the languages from which they are drawn are very different as well.
The institutional keeper of U.S. place names is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names that Henry Gannett helped found in 1890. You can visit its website here:
http://geonames.usgs.gov
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which makes the Board's entire database of U.S. place names downloadable for people to study and map as they see fit.
For a somewhat more user-friendly way of accessing these data, try the database of U.S. Place and Geographic Names at
https://www.melissadata.com/lookups/placenames.asp
(try entering "Madison" into the search box to see how it works)
For a sense of what can be done with these downloaded place names, check out this lovely map of generic terms for streams in the contiguous United States, developed by the graphic designer Derek Watkins:
https://derekwatkins.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/generic-stream-terms/
Finally, for an accessible, easy-to-read (though now rather dated) introduction to U.S. place naming practices, the classic work continues to be George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945, 1958, 1967).
There are multiple cultural, colonial, and linguistic traditions that have informed U.S. place names. Because of extensive literacy and legal records that existed here in the US in a way that they have not always existed in Britain, we can construct the origins of many place names here in the U.S.
Place name study in Britain often focuses on the statistical distribution of place name elements whose origins can no longer be recovered; in the United States, on the other hand, place name study most frequently focuses on the first appearance of a name and the reason they original namer chose it--something that can be recovered with surprising frequency. Many states have dictionaries of place names that appear within their boundaries.
For an example of well-known place names whose first appearance can readily be documented, consider the 1673 journey of Pierre Marquette and Louis Joliet that was briefly described in the first lecture of the course. On their journey across Lake Michigan, up the Fox River, down the Wisconsin River, down the Mississippi as far as Arkansas, then back up to Lake Michigan via the Illinois River, the explorers collected many place names from their Native American guides. Recall that in the course of their travels, they would have encountered a number of different linguistic traditions (although the Algonquin language family was dominant in the region through which they traveled at the start of their journey).
What are the names recorded by Marquette and Joliet that have been left on the map of North America today?
The Mississippi River is an especially interesting case from this same journey. The river had been encountered by Europeans for a century and a half prior to Marquette & Joliet's journey, but was not initially labeled "Mississippi"; Marquette & Joliet are the reason that name has stuck. Here's how:
1519: Pineda was the first Spaniard to see the river from the gulf coast. He called it Espirtu Santo, “Holy Spirit.”
1541: De Soto encountered the river during his land journey west from Florida, but didn’t name it. His men called it "Río Grande," the Big River. When his scribes asked natives for its name, they were given several different alternatives: Chucagua, Tamalisieu, Nilco, Mico; at its mouth, it was called simply “The River.” Other local names included Okachitto, Olsimochitto, Namosi-sipu, Sassagoula, Culata.
1673: Marquette & Joliet approached the river from the north (via the Fox-Wisconsin route), so the first native peoples to describe it to them were Algonquin speakers. One branch of the river that ran along the edge of the lands occupied by the Ojibwas, Miamis, Outagamis, Illinois, who called it Kitchi-zibi, Mis-sipi, Misisipi: e.g., Ojibwa mshi- ”big” + -ziibi “river”
Because Marquette and Joliet learned the Ojibwe name for the river, they carried that Ojibwa name downstream with them into territories occupied by very different peoples. Because they were traveling downstream rather than upstream, they transported the Algonquin language name for the river and Mississippi became the river's name as a result. Also, because they were traveling south from Wisconsin, their encounter with the Pekitanoui (Missouri) River near what is today St. Louis led them to experience it as a tributary of the "main" river they were on. Had travelers from the south been traveling upstream, they likely would have carried a southern name with them, and might well have chosen what is today called the Missouri River (or possibly the Ohio River) as the main branch. So not only the name "Mississippi River" but also the choice about its main stem were partly determined by the accident of Marquette and Joliet's route. Notice how differently travelers could experience a river depending on whether they were heading upstream or downstream--and how this different could affect the place names they adopted.
Other French travelers had attached still more names to the river: Buade, Conception, Colbert, Louisiane, St. Louis. But Mississippi eventually became stable name for whole river.
By the way, it's characteristic of place names that some of the oldest and most persistent are the names of rivers, because they touch the lives of so many people and because they're such a stable feature in the overall landscape. The conservatism of river names is a feature of modern geography all over the world--though as the case of the Mississippi demonstrates, a long river that travels through the territories of many different linguistic groups may have quite different names in those different languages.
Pull back and think about language as an expression of conquest and colonization: imperial nations making territorial claims in North America included:
There's an interesting demonstration of these colonial/linguistic traditions reflected in the following map of the most common surnames in different states of the U.S., colored according to the languages from which those names derive:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/interactive-map-reveals-the-most-common-surnames-in-the-788227040
also: https://external-preview.redd.it/SMJ-K1R7MMXTnyKEA_e3PDzKNnXKTAmxorCKWu-PVpg.jpg?s=713eb44f360c6f557f2c654fe3172140b4574fdf
One way to think about place names: English/French/Spanish colonists took place names from their homelands and reproduced them on the North American landscape. Certainly this was true of English colonists, who often named their settlements after the communities in England they had left behind--and such names could then be repeated in other parts of North America as people migrated again from those towns. A few of these are mapped in the following article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/04/mapping-the-places-in-america-named-after-places-in-england/?utm_term=.0fa731164808
Here are a few other examples of what you can do by downloading place name data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and mapping selected place name elements:
Angelic vs demonic place names:
http://blog.jonathan-hull.com/post/70704272426/heaven-usa-map-after-the-articles-posted-by-the
http://blog.jonathan-hull.com/post/65445239997/devil-map-usa-yes-this-is-a-repost-of-an-info
http://blog.jonathan-hull.com/post/70905878229/heaven-hell-usa-following-up-from-the-map-of
Interestingly, the angelic names on these maps tend to be associated with settlements, whereas the devilish names tend to be associated with more remote, outlying areas.
Many states in the US have Native American names (26 states); their origins are summarized by Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_in_the_United_States_of_Native_American_origin
In English colonies, many places were named for English monarchs and aristocrats, as in the following examples:
After the American Revolution, this affection for the English monarchy unsurprisingly receded among citizens of the young republic (though it continued north of the border in the lands that are now Canada). In its place, heroes of the new republic began to appear in place names, for instance:
Interestingly, some of these names for prominent national figures themselves derived from place names originally situated in England. For instance, major western cities were named for:
But notice:
Another favorite place name convention in the early republic were names expressing ideals for that place or its inhabitants:
Literary borrowings were taken from almost any language that sounded euphonious:
There was great enthusiasm for places ending in –ville (a French suffix, not much used in Britain, but not even used as much in France as in the United States):
-polis (from Greek for city) was also very popular for forming city names. One of the best known examples is Minneapolis: which originally derived from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s much-loved poem “Hiawatha." The name of the woman that Hiawatha loved in that poem was was Minnehaha (a name from the Dakota name for river, Mnisota, “clear or cloudy blue water”). So, in 1852, the local citizens of the new city at the Falls of St. Anthony on the Minnesota River proposed that their town be called Minnehahapolis, which was then shortened to Minneapolis.
All of these place names, and place naming practices, can be mapped, and each has a history uniquely its own. To review some of these mappable naming practices, see:
http://ideasillustrated.com/blog/2014/03/23/most-popular-word-roots-in-u-s-place-names/
Such stories are endless, scattered everywhere on the map of North America. Place names are rich historical documents. We hope this lecture has shown some of the questions we can ask about their origins and changing meanings.
One last point that will surface again in the upcoming lecture on Indian Country. There is a special class of place names that are ascribed to a particular location by a group of outsiders who mark those places as being associated with a group of people whom the namers identify as alien "others." Many of these mark places that are pejoratively associated with segregated communities of people who are marked as racial "outsiders": African Americans, Native Americans, and so on. The United States Board on Geographic Names has sought to expunge such names from the map...and yet they mark a history of racism that is important to remember in the making of the American landscape. We'll talk more about that going forward.