The owner of
so musically appreciative an ear is Robert Louis Stevenson in Across the Plains (1892), as cited by H.L. Mencken in The American Language
(1919; fourth edition, “corrected, enlarged, and rewritten,” 1936). Stevenson adds,
“Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.”
That would be Ohio, my home state, and I have visited all four communities and
lived for several years as a young newspaper reporter in Sandusky County. I
know Bellefontaine well enough to know locals pronounce it BELL-fountain.
Stevenson wasn’t the first to celebrate the poetry of American place names, but
he may be the most appreciative non-American to do so:
“The names
of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota,
and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a
songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western
continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the
names of states and cities
that would strike the fancy in a business circular.”
I lived in
Ohio until I was thirty, when I moved to Indiana for another newspaper job.
Here’s a chronological list of the cities and towns in which I lived: Maple
Heights, Parma Heights, Bowling Green, Cleveland, Boardman, Youngstown,
Montpelier, Bellevue. That last town, which is parceled out among four counties
(including Sandusky), is about seven miles southeast of Clyde, where Sherwood
Anderson lived as a boy and renamed, for fictional purposes, Winesburg. Other place
names in the Buckeye State I fondly recall:
Ada, Bucyrus, Chillicothe, Defiance, Eaton, Fostoria, Gahanna, Huron, Independence, Jerusalem, Kettering, Lima, Martins Ferry, Napoleon, Oberlin, Pataskala, Quaker City, Rocky River, Seven Hills, Tiffin, Urbana, Van Wert, Wauseon, Xenia, Yellow Springs, Zanesville.
Ada, Bucyrus, Chillicothe, Defiance, Eaton, Fostoria, Gahanna, Huron, Independence, Jerusalem, Kettering, Lima, Martins Ferry, Napoleon, Oberlin, Pataskala, Quaker City, Rocky River, Seven Hills, Tiffin, Urbana, Van Wert, Wauseon, Xenia, Yellow Springs, Zanesville.
4 comments:
While I still envy the U. K. for what seems to me their richer names in English, this post did help me appreciate some of our American entities: much of the best are Native American.
Thank you, Patrick, for your tribute to the music that is the map of Ohio. Having attended college in central Ohio (Kenyon, an intellectual contradiction to its surroundings) I developed the following view of a tripartite state: southern Ohio around Cincinnati, that’s “Kentucky”; central Ohio with its cows and colleges is “ Ohio”; and the north up through Cleveland to the lake : “ New Jersey”.
When Ohio place names are the topic, Chagrin Falls is a necessary inclusion.
I would say that at first blush, U.K. place names are richer by far in impermeability, though the code may be cracked by the diligent scholar.
I know for a fact that Anecdotal Evidence is well-appreciated in Chagrin Falls.
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