It is remarkable to consider the number of place names that derive from the difficulties that North Carolinians had in crossing creeks. Pig Basket Creek in Nash County, for example. It seems that an early settler, headed home with a basket of newborn pigs, dropped them into the water as he tried to cross the creek, which was swollen by recent rains.
Then there are the place names with unusual—often wildly so—derivations: Asey Hole, Bandana, Black Ankle, Calico Creek, Cat Square, Dixie, Easy Street, Enola, Haoe, Handy, Hanging Dog, Huggins Hell, Ivanhoe, Lawyers Spring, Naked Mountain, Observer, Oriental, Revolution, Rhodo, Shakerage, Tater Hill, Virgilina, Whynot.
Look a little further and you will find 12 Concords, 11 Gum Swamps, 10 Big Laurels, 9 Tarkilns, 8 Silvermines, 7 Frying Pans, 6 Vances, 5 Milksicks, 4 Whetstones, 3 Sengs (as in ginseng), 2 Kill Quicks, and 1—and only 1—Shit-Britches Creek. Add to that 149 Bears, 103 Beavers, 85 Chestnuts, 85 Horses, 68 Wolfs, 68 Grassys, 66 White Oaks, 51 Turkeys, 49 Saints, 46 Hogs, 38 Buffalos, 35 Little Creeks, 34 Forts, 30 Wildcats, 32 Rattlesnakes, 28 mentions of Sassafras, 22 Ravens, 14 Jumping Runs, and 13 Town Creeks.
We know all of this because of William S. Powell's work on The North Carolina Gazetteer. Published in 1968, the book set a new standard for guides to place names. It is the most consulted book in my office and in many offices and libraries. No other state has anything to approach it. Powell's Gazetteer is a classic, a work of use to historians, genealogists, librarians, journalists, creative writers, geographers, urban planners, armchair travelers, and anyone with an interest in the Old North State. In working on a revised edition, I did so with the knowledge that the book is a gem, and, aside from a new polish and a few new facets, it should remain largely intact. To my mind, the Gazetteer provides no greater service than to preserve the memory of places already gone or in danger of disappearing due to urban growth and development—what might be called suburban swallowups.
Indeed, the question may arise about the need for this type of reference book in the Digital Age of the twenty-first century, when information is a few keystrokes away via Google Earth, MapQuest, WorldCat, and other Internet marvels. Global Positioning System (GPS) units are now inexpensive and widely used. I would argue that these new technologies and databases make the Gazetteer all the more valuable. New technologies can locate with precision the places we live, work, and play, but technology alone cannot tell their stories. With its focus not just on locating but on describing the origins and naming of North Carolina's cities, towns, crossroads communities, waterways, peaks, and other places and physical features, the Gazetteer is as valuable today as it was when first published more than forty years ago. And given the state's rapid growth over the last decades, there are many new readers who can learn from and enjoy the information contained herein.
In 2007 Professor Powell and editors at the University of North Carolina Press asked me to take on the responsibility of producing this revised edition. With 19,638 entries in the original edition, I commenced my search for additional entries. In the end, I added about 1,200. The work would involve updates of existing entries and a close examination of the criteria to determine which new entries would be logical fits. Some of these were obvious. Jordan Lake, for example, did not exist when the original edition was published but undoubtedly belonged in the Gazetteer. Most readers would join me in recognizing that, for the most part, we stopped making a significant number of new place names a long time ago. Some modern names do not belong in the book. This would include residential subdivisions, the kinds of communities that spell harbor with a u and town with an e.
This matter of list making, of course, did not begin with Professor Powell. Map-makers have been at work describing, depicting, and inventorying the landscape since the days of John White and the Roanoke colonies. A substantial number of Tar Heel place names from Chicamacomico to Nantahala have Native American origins. Successive waves of settlers—the Moravians to name just one group—assigned names to places. The Revolutionary War generation left the greatest imprint on place names, having the distinction of selecting most county names. Arnold Guyot, the Harvard scientist who came south to survey the North Carolina mountains in the 1850s, kept such a list in his notebooks along with altitudes. Today, Mount Guyot, named in his honor, stands in Haywood County and is duly recorded in the Gazetteer.
Professor Powell made wide use of maps in producing his original work. One that he did not consult is the 1901 Historical Map and Gazetteer of North Carolina, prepared by D. C. Mangum of Durham and issued by Rand McNally. It is the type of old wall map that once decorated classrooms, depots, and public buildings. For this project, the utility of the beautifully designed and richly detailed Mangum map derives from the year of its issue: 1901. The map was prepared during the heyday of small, unincorporated communities in North Carolina, after the rise of the railroads and the proliferation of post offices but, importantly, before the consolidation of post offices and the use of rural free delivery, which came about after 1915. Interested readers are invited to examine the Mangum map and other digitized maps at the North Carolina Maps project website (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/ncmaps/index.html).
In his preface, Professor Powell explained why he elected not to include most post offices. In short, it was because in many cases these were not true communities but rather a store, a gristmill, or just someone's house. Still, there was inconsistency with respect to post offices. For Warren County and Caswell County, every post office is included in the original edition. Mangum's map helped separate the wheat from the chaff among the 6,900 post offices that have operated in North Carolina over the years. From the Mangum map, I could detail the section of the county where the community was located. If it was on a creek or a railroad, I could determine that. Of course, it was silent with respect to name derivation. But with a list of place names in hand from the Mangum map, I then could turn to the four-volume guide to post offices issued by the North Carolina Postal History Society in 1997 to record the years of operation.
Since 1968 other reference works have appeared that proved useful. The Omni-Gazetteer of the United States, a massive tome published in 1990, is among these. The National Gazetteer of the United States, issued by the U.S. Geological Survey and updated regularly, is another. The former includes churches, water towers, dams, cemeteries, airports, schools, bridges, broadcast towers, and a host of sites not documented in Powell's book. The latter is authoritative. But these reference sources are, despite their inclusiveness, dry as dust compared to the Gazetteer. The stories attached to place names are at the core of Powell's book and the reason why it has stood the test of time.
In conducting an entry-by-entry examination of the old volume, I found that a few necessary changes were quickly apparent. In listings for counties and towns, for example, principal agricultural and industrial products were indicated. These include, for places both large and small, textiles, the industry so long associated with the state and one that was still relatively healthy in 1968. In many cases, I simply struck the word; in others, I changed the reference to the past tense. You cannot profile Kannapolis without noting the role of Cannon Mills and the production of towels. And, to bring the entry up to date, the town's new research campus, with its focus on nutrition, needs to be mentioned.
Other commodities are treated similarly. The updating of the agricultural and industrial production, surprisingly, was among the toughest nuts to crack. The N.C. Departments of Agriculture and Commerce keep detailed statistics, but their abstracts did not translate well to the county and town level. At any rate, I reviewed all such entries—everything from gravel to strawberries—but I know that some items must have slipped by. The presence of textile production, literally hanging by a thread in so many communities, likely will go misrepresented in some instances.
Streams and other waterways are treated fully in the original edition. I wish that I could have done more with landings and with plantation names. I am convinced that a book (or at least a scholarly article) could be written on the variations of Indian names such as Torhunta and Ocracoke. Transliteration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not an easy or simple matter.
Occasionally, I would correct an entry. The Gazetteer, for example, indicates that the word “lynch” is taken from Lynch Creek, but most etymologists now agree that such is not the case. A number of terms of personal interest are also now included. These include Speculation Land, the story of Tench Coxe and the disposition of a half million acres in Henderson, Polk, and Rutherford Counties. The story of Joara, the Indian village in Burke County, upon which Juan Pardo's men built Fort San Juan, is another. I created entries for Back of Beyond, Backcountry, and Cackalacky, a popular nickname for Carolina with obscure roots. Dry Hill was a long-gone, one-room school and community in the area where I grew up in Henderson County.
The naming of a county can provide a lesson in North Carolina history. What is now Greene County was once part of Johnston, but in 1758 it became Dobbs County for royal governor Arthur Dobbs. In 1791 that name was “expunged from our map,” as historian Kemp Battle phrased it, and a new county was named for Secretary of State James Glasgow. After Glasgow met an ignominious end involving land fraud, in 1799 the name was changed to Greene County to honor Nathanael Greene, the hero of Guilford Courthouse.
With details from the Mangum map and the post office guide, I was able to create about 600 new entries for the Gazetteer, about half of my total number of new additions. And these turned out to be some of the more fascinating place names. Moore County, for some reason, was particularly rich. There was a post office called Tempting, no doubt selected to lure the late nineteenth-century tourist trade. In 1882 in northwest Moore, there was a community with the unlikely name of Noise. The next year, just ten miles away, neighbors founded Quiet. Some post office names recall faraway places: Bombay, Klondike, Oswego, Bismarck, Shanghai, Moscow, Pomona, Berlin, Nebraska. One of those was Japan in Graham County, a community inundated by the waters of the lake behind Fontana Dam. Before it disappeared, locals during World War II began calling it MacArthur. Others paint their locality as a little piece of heaven on earth: Bliss, Breeze, Splendor, Sweet Home.
At the outset of my work, I prepared an appeal for assistance and distributed it by e-mail listservs and other means. Like Professor Powell, I pinned my hopes largely on the community of local historians and librarians. I did not get a response from all 100 counties, but those who helped out did so with enthusiasm and respect for Powell's work. “Viva the Gazetteer,” wrote one.
I wish to thank the dedicated researchers who responded to my call and, in some cases, shared details that they had amassed over many years working on their county: Carole Troxler and Lisa Kobrin (Alamance); Clarence Horton (Cabarrus); Victor Jones (Craven); Barbara Snowden (Currituck); David Stick and Naomi Rhodes (Dare); Jane McAllister and James Wall (Davie); Sonny Sikes (Duplin); Monika Fleming (Edgecombe); Leonard Dean (Granville); Helen Snow and Gwen Gosney Erickson (Guilford); Ronnie Faulkner (Harnett); Mary Lowder (Haywood); John Ward (Hertford); Jean Krause and Anne Swan (McDowell); Jack Thomas (Madison); Jane Johnson, Shelia Bumgarner, Linda Blackwelder, and James Williams (Mecklenburg); Sharon Faulkner (Montgomery); Mary and Charles Prevost (Moore); Bob Carter (Rockingham); Steve Shelton (Stokes); Ken Badgett (Surry); Marcy Thompson (Transylvania); Patrick Valentine (Wilson); and Andrew Mackie and Barbara Norman (Yadkin). James Wall, David Stick, and H. G. Jones were contributors to the original edition and I thank them for returning to the task. All were generous in sharing information.
Offering assistance of a more general nature were Robert Anthony, Tom Beaman, Matthew Brown, Robert Cain, Steve Case, Beth Hayden, Charles Heath, Joy Heitman, Josh Howard, H. G. Jones, Jay Lester, Vivian McDuffie, Cheryl McLean, Chris Meekins, Lynn Roundtree, Druscie Simpson, Jason Tomberlin, Pam Toms, Walter Turner, Ansley Wegner, and Ashley Yandle. Colleagues at the Office of Archives and History, at the State Library of North Carolina, and in the North Carolina Collection in Chapel Hill were always willing to lend a hand. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Professor Powell and his wife, Virginia. George Stevenson, assistant to Powell in the North Carolina Collection and key to development of the original book, pointed me toward valuable source material. Mark Simpson-Vos of UNC Press assisted with the loan of a laptop computer with the original text installed in Filemaker Pro. Jay Mazzocchi completed the time-consuming and tedious task of copyediting the manuscript. The foregoing deserve no responsibility for any errors which arise; such remain my doing alone. Readers who wish to share information or point out the need for a correction are invited to contact Michael Hill at the N.C. Office of Archives and History, 4610 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-4610.
My habit, as I worked on this project, was to highlight entries in the old edition with an exclamation point if a humorous or intriguing story was attached. My copy therefore is dotted with such marks. Two new ones came to me from my correspondents in Davie County: Bullhole, a site on the Yadkin River where an early settler fell through the crude bridge with his team of cattle; and Turkeyfoot, the convergence of several roads that, when viewed from the air, resembles a gobbler's appendage. I invite the reader to dip into the new edition for such revelations.
MICHAEL HILL
May 2009