Fragments From Floyd

The biweekly topic at the Ecotone for October 15 is Place Names. Got any interesting place names near you or place name stories you'd be willing to share? You can leave them as comments here if I can't talk you into contributing to the Ecotone.

My wife thinks it odd that if I can find an old road map under the seat of the car somewhere, I can amuse myself for a half hour while she is in the fabric store. And this is a fact, I admit. It doesn't matter how old or of where; a map contains a hundred stories in the names that places have been given, and the imagination is free to ponder and concoct. While there may be the kernel of a fact wrapped up in the names of villages, mountains, crossroads and rivers, more often than not, the names make me wonder about the part of the story that they don't tell.

Just glancing at the map of southwest Virginia now, for instance... over there is Barren Springs. I bet there's a story in the name. Maybe it wasn't the springs that were barren. Perhaps it was thought at one time that the water contained a poison that would result in stillborn children. Hmmmm. And over a county or two is Porter's Crossroads-- like many names, commemorative for an unknown (most likely Mr.) Porter. Some once-significant roads intersected there, and so it became a center of commerce. Maybe it was just a farming community, but possibly it nurtured an early industry related to the lead mines that made shot for the Confederate Army. And obviously this was a former glory as PC now lies now in the middle of nowhere. Shooting Creek, right here in Floyd County, was the scene of a fierce battle between the moonshiners and the revenuers come to bust up their moonshine stills, if I'm remembering my tales right, and I would have imagined just such a history from seeing the name on a county map. Boone's Mill; Haymakertown; Yellow Sulfur Springs... all tell of a central enterprise that once happened in those places with enough regularity or importance that the little settlements got labeled by them.

Other names are more geographic, like Five Mile Mountain that meanders down the Blue Ridge towards Ferrum; Bent Mountain that plunges zigzagging off the same geology toward Roanoke; and Buffalo Mountain, so named not because the creatures used to live there but because the outline of the 4000 foot tall monadnock looks in outline like a resting buffalo. It is the most outstanding single physical feature of the county and the high school teams take their names from it.

Place names can be mystifying. You wonder what the town fathers were thinking when they came up with the name Breeding Ranch over in a nearby county, until you understand it was named after a Mr. Breeding and does not promote promiscuity in any way, as your mind might at first have imagined. What you can't tell from looking at map names is that town names often take on their own local pronunciation. Wytheville, where we lived for 12 years, was widely pronounced Whiffle; the nearby sleepy village of Rural Retreat (the home of Dr. Pepper) had way too many "R"s to get your teeth around, and it was called simply "Earl Treat". One was thought affected if they enunciated the third syllable of Fort Chiswell, and instead it was often simply Fort Chissel. Nearer to Floyd, Staunton is Stanton, Buena Vista is Byou-na Vista, Meadows of Dan (near the headwaters of the Dan River) is MedduzzaDan...all one word. You know you got yourself a tourist if they pronounce the "of".

When we first moved from Alabama to Virginia long ago, I was a little ruffled to find that so many of the counties in the "commonwealth" (Virginia is technically NOT a state, you see) were high-falluting names of colonial royalty: Prince William, Prince George, Prince Edward, King and Queen, King George Counties. I imagined powdered wigs and lacey collars and poofy cuffs on all the local farmers in those counties. Where I had come from we were less pretentious, more earthy and yet also recognizing of our roots: Lochapoka, Notasulga, Saugahatchee, Euphapee, Chewalkla, Sylacauga, Coosa, Tallapoosa were little Alabama towns or creeks near Auburn where I first started enjoying maps and map names. They were the multisyllabic names the Cherokee and Choctaw (two Alabama County names, by the way) had given to those places; although how they knew one place from another without these convenient municipality lines and county seats layed out nice and neat on the map is a mystery to me.

So. Next time you get stranded in an interstate motel room with nothing to read but Gideons Bible and the Rand-McNally Atlas, after you've read a selection from the Psalms and one from the gospels ('cause this is as close as some of ya blamed heatherns are gonna get to going to church)-- head straight for the atlas pages that show Idaho, Minnesota and Vermont. Find the three most intriguing place names on each; amuse yourself by making up stories to explain each name. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to nestle down under those stiff, smoky sheets and listen til morning to the ice machine and the biker dudes in the room next door.