Geography Lesson

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States
By George Stewart
NYRB Classics, 544 pages, $19.95

A young man, let’s say, finds himself in the attic of his grandmother’s house in Ancram, N.Y., on a rainy afternoon in the late autumn, looking for a book to read. In a pile of dusty volumes under one window, between bound volumes of a previous generation’s women’s magazines and moldering French cookbooks, he finds George Stewart’s classic Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States. (A toponymist, English professor and expert on ballads, Stewart was also a prolific, best-selling novelist, whose 1941 novel Storm inspired the now universal practice of giving women’s names to storms.)

Our young man opens Names on the Land to the index to find Newport News, and, after he has read about the two Irish brothers named Newce who founded the Virginian town as New Port Newce, he continues on, discovering an almost unbelievably broad and rapid survey of the history of the United States told through its place names.

In some places, the language is evocative—"After the galleons of the Armada were splintered hulks on the Irish headlands, the English came on again"—but often it’s brisk and businesslike, like the country’s great port cities, or a bit stiff and pompous, as befits a young country striving to distinguish itself from the old world. The landscape is studded with interesting anecdotes (how a creek in Kentucky was named Lulbegrud because Daniel Boone was reading Gulliver’s Travels; how Charles II added the "Penn" to William Penn’s Sylvania) and astonishing facts: As of 1932, there were 121 American cities and towns and 257 townships named after George Washington.

Occasionally Names on the Land, first released during World War II and now reprinted by NYRB Classics, breaks out in rude patriotism, and once or twice in sarcasm, as when the author remarks that it was "natural" for Englishmen to laugh at American place names, residing as they did in "a country blessed with Maidenhead, Fryup, Sizergh, Great Snoring, Shitlington, and Ashby de la Zouche." He ranges back as far as pre-Roman Britain in his history of "New York," but stays scrupulously within his premise: Once or twice, as if unavoidably, he mentions names in what is now Canada, but otherwise he discusses the names of this country and none other. Stewart updated the book in 1958 to include Alaska and Hawaii; but although he elucidates the origin of the abbreviation U.S.A.—it was stamped on rifle barrels in the Revolutionary War—he curiously never discusses "America" itself.

Altogether, our young reader’s main impressions are simply of speed and of quantity: He finds himself moving rapidly through names so numerous as to deaden his capacity to distinguish them. One place-name origin can be interesting, and three enlightening—but several hundred seem to prove only that there’s nothing they can teach you. There are dozens of Berlins in the United States, for example, but most of them were after a Burleigh or Burland or Birling. What look like Dutch names are often misspelled Indian names, and vice versa; what are in fact Indian names have often traveled away from their place of origin, or have been misunderstood or misapplied; and any given Alexandria could have been named after the ancient Egyptian city, some English or French or German royal figure, a local landowner surnamed Alexander, or any number of other things—if not simply another, older American Alexandria.

But once our reader has adjusted to the landscape’s vast size, once he has overcome his initial vertigo, he’ll realize that the speed, the quantity and the sheer variety of American place names are precisely the point: Its lapses into balder patriotism aside, George Stewart’s book is a brilliant and powerful portrait of the United States as historically unique in its vigor and the profundity of its self-creation.

Will Heinrich is on the staff of The Observer. He can be reached at wheinrich@observer.com.