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The Place Names of Boone County, Missouri

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The Place Names of Boone County, Missouri Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 THE PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI ROBERT L. RAMSAY University of Missouri Two ways lie open to one who essays the formidable task of covering the field of Missouri place names. One is extensive, the other intensive. The first of these contrasting methods of approach has already been attempted in a study published by the University of Missouri in June, 1952, under the title Our Storehouse of Missouri Place Names} This was a sampling of some 2 0 0 0 of the 35-40,000 place names found in the entire State, including the names of all its 114 counties and their county seats, all its cities and towns that had a population of a thousand or more at the last census, all the larger and many of the older and more interesting rivers, lakes, and mountains, and about as many of the smaller places, including many names that have disappeared from present usage, whenever they help to fill out and illustrate the main classes of our names, or offer problems of particular suggestiveness. Its aim was to survey in selective fashion and to exemplify the five chief groups into which all our names seem to fall: namely, our borrowed names, our historical names, our local personal names, our topo­ graphical names, and what I have ventured to call our cultural names, together with a tentative list of names still unsolved, and our plans for future work. The present study constitutes the second milestone on the steep and rugged pathway to the final goal we hope some day to reach, which is a complete and comprehensive dictionary of all the place names of our State. It is an intensive study of a single central county, designed as far as may be to offer an exhaustive and defini­ tive synthesis of one important and typical portion of the entire field. It is conceived in the same way as the searching and scholarly study made in 1947 by Frederic G. Cassidy, The Place Names of Dane County, Wisconsin.2 Here I have chosen Boone County, Missouri, for much the same reasons—because it is close to the heart of the State and fairly representative of the entire common­ wealth historically, economically, and culturally, and yet has a 1 Robert L. Ramsay, Missouri Handbook No. 2, University of Missouri Bulletin, Vol. 53, No. 34. * Publication of the American Dialect Society, No. 7. 5 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 6 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY natural and organic unity of its own; because it contains the State’s educational capital; and because it includes among its approximately 2 0 0 place names examples of nearly all the cate­ gories and problems of nomenclature found in the whole of Missouri. A word of explanation may be inserted here about the sources of our information and the methods that have been used in col­ lecting it. For the past quarter of a century, the University of Missouri has been making a survey of all the place names of the State. A card file containing all the information that had been collected up till that time regarding 32,324 of our names was com­ pleted a few years ago and placed in the Library of the University, where it may be consulted by all who are interested. Another copy of it may be found at Washington, D. C., in the library of the Board on Geographic Names of the Department of the Interior. The material it contains was gathered from 1928 to 1948 by gradu­ ate students in the Department of English, in a series of eighteen manuscript theses, as yet unpublished, covering the entire State. Since then between five and six thousand additional names have been examined. Much remains to be done in the way of sifting and condensing, checking and editing. There are hundreds of tantalizing problems still unsolved, and gaps and omissions of all sorts yet to be filled. Step by step, however, we are making progress toward the construction of a comprehensive dictionary of Missouri place names, mainly by trying to exhaust the problems of indi­ vidual counties one after another. The very first of our eighteen theses, completed in 1928, was a study of the place names of the seven central counties of Boone, Callaway, Cole, Cooper, Howard, Moniteau, and Saline. Nearly seven hundred names were included, about a hundred of them from Boone County. This pioneer piece of research was accomplished by Miss Nadine Pace, 3 now Mrs. Ben Ely and a teacher in the English Department of Hannibal-Lagrange College at Hannibal, Missouri. Miss Pace began her work by noting all that had previously been written about Missouri place names, chiefly in the frag­ mentary studies of Eaton, Gannett, and others, and in scattered articles in local journals. Then she searched through all the State a Place Names in the Central Counties of Missouri (Manuscript thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate School of the University of Missouri, 1928). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 PLACE NAMES OF BOONE COUNTY, MISSOURI 7 and county histories for notes about names. No county in Missouri has had more informative and interesting county histories than those of Boone by E. W. Stephens, W. F. Switzler, N. T. Gentry, and Walter Williams. Then came the gazetteers, directories, laws, maps and atlases, and all other records available in our University Library and the library of the State Historical Society. It re­ mained for Miss Pace to go out into the field, visiting each county seat and all other important points, and interviewing old residents who in many cases had valuable information that had never been published and that might have perished if she had not so pains­ takingly collected it. Among lifelong residents of Boone County who were particularly helpful were J. F. Brossart, cashier of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad; M. G. Proctor, former county collector; P. S. Quinn, county surveyor; A. M. Schwabe, fanner; J. C. Schwabe, real estate dealer; Floyd C. Shoemaker, secretary of the Missouri State Historical Society; E. W. Stephens, historian and journalist ; W. D. Vandiver, the Rev. H. F. Cheavens, Mrs. Amanda Forbis, Edwin Nichols, and John W. Sappington. Since 1928 a number of other painstaking pieces of research on the place names of Boone County have been accomplished by University students. Perhaps the greatest help has come from the detailed studies that have since been made of the rest of the 114 counties in the State, where the same or kindred names are often found. Comparison and contrast of the nomenclature found in this central county with those around it has been fruitful in many ways. We have been able almost to double the number of names explained in Miss Pace’s initial study, and to reach illuminating conclusions and new discoveries, hitherto unpublished. (2) T h e K e n t u c k y K e y n o t e Most of our Missouri counties have a certain number of foreign names, borrowed in liberal and cosmopolitan spirit from nearly every land in the world. Many of the important cities of the world, as well as a few countries, have been relocated in Missouri. We have our own London, Edinburg [sic], Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam, (New) Madrid, Lisbon, Moscow, Odessa, Carthage, Kimberley, Mexico, Lima, Potosi, Manilla [sic], Japan, and Çanton. But not one of these aliens is to be found within the confines of Boone County, which is perhaps the most American of all our 114 counties. Other counties have borrowed Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/18/1/4/450427/0180004.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 8 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY freely from every other state in the Union. Within the bounds of the State may be discovered a new and better, if not bigger, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, Atlanta, San Fran­ cisco, Sacramento, and Nevada. But none of them are located in Boone County. All the borrowed names of Boone, with one sole exception, come from a single state. The keynote of our Boone County names is Kentucky. We have thirty or more Kentucky names in this single county. The county’s map really looks like a bit of the Blue Grass State trans­ planted across the Mississippi. No other Missouri county is so remarkably single-minded in this respect. Most of our thirty Kentucky names, it is true, were brought to Kentucky from Vir­ ginia, but they came to Boone in almost every instance direct from the Blue Grass. Kentucky has often been called the mother of Missouri, and Virginia its grandmother; if that is true, then Boone County is certainly the special darling of the family, and the one that shows the closest family resemblance. The reasons for this filial devotion are of course well known to all who are familiar with Boone County’s history and the origins of its early population. Before it became a county in 1820, it had been a part of Howard County, which was created in 1816. Howard, the first western county to be organized for the rapidly increasing settlement up the Missouri River, has been called the “Mother of Counties,” for out of its enormous territory were eventually carved no fewer than thirty-one of our present Missouri counties, together with at least five now included in Iowa.
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