“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”
--Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, II.ii.43-44
Had Juliet been a real South Carolinian, rather than a fictional Veronese, she might not have posed such a philosophical question in the famous play bearing her name. Ashepoo, Honea Path, Tega Cay, Fountain Inn, Daufuskie—it’s hard to imagine South Carolina being so sweet without such words decorating our maps and serving as our landmarks.
Like most writers, I am obsessed with toponymy—the study of place names that shape our awareness of who we are and where we are—and so, in February of 2021, I embarked on what I can only call a “South Carolina place name road trip.” I logged over 800 miles—roughly the distance from Columbia, South Carolina to Columbia, Missouri—to learn about the origins of ten of the state’s most intriguingly-named places: Round O, North, Plum Branch, Ninety Six, Due West, Possum Kingdom, Cross Anchor, Prosperity, Coward, and Ketchuptown.
The article “Place Names”—a series of 10 vignettes about my experience in each town—appeared in the December 2021 online issue of South Carolina Living. You can read it as it originally appeared HERE.
My inspiration for such an article had been two unusual hardbacks on my bookshelf: George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place Naming in the United States (1945); and Claude and Irene Neuffer’s Correct Mispronunciations of Some South Carolina Names (1983). From these two books, let me quote two lines revealing why I was interested in such a project:
Stewart: “Yet the names [in America] had grown out of the life, and the life-blood, of all those who had gone before. From the names might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune, and another joked, twisting an old name to make a new one.”
Neuffers: “In no way can we claim that this little lexicon is definitive. In some cases we have discussed the origin of a name for no better reason than that it pleased us to do so.”
As much as I subscribed to Stewart’s philosophy, my investigation, like the Neuffers, wasn’t academic research. I am a regional magazine writer by trade, and this road trip was only the means to an end. I knew that colorful town names would lead me down colorful backroads to colorful places and colorful people. And local color, of course, is what needs to fill up a magazine like South Carolina Living.
An academic might call place names something like “linguistic legacies of culture and migration,” but for a magazine writer, they are simply great conversation starters. To ask someone about the town’s name is as fruitful as asking them about where to find the town’s best cheeseburger. The next thing you know, you are talking about rabbit hunting or training horses or the last passenger train to come through town.
Of course, much of history is Google-able these days, but I wanted to hear it in the words of the people. My goal was to interview a diverse cross-section of regional historians, local know-it-alls, area raconteurs, and random passerby. The old waters may have dried up, the railroads decommissioned, the battles long over, but town names live on. I wanted to know, simply, if people still knew why.
What I found out is that the origin of a town’s name often remains a mystery. Of the five people I talked to in Adam’s Run, for instance, none could tell me who Adam was, nor why he might have been running. But I also found that place names, like food, are gateways into our political and natural histories—they remind us of features in the landscape, of occurrences in particular spots, of honored leaders and homelands.
After my trip, however, there remained plenty of towns that I had not visited, but which still tantalized me on the South Carolina map. Blue Brick, Trio, Eureka, Lone Star, Stringfellow, Bucklick, Climax, Goat Alley, Giant…to name but a few.
I also happened to notice that, either by coincidence or design, each of the ten places I visited for the first article was located in a different South Carolina county. This, then, gave me a new idea and a system. I would pore over the South Carolina atlas of the other 36 counties, hunting the most interesting place name in each. If, at first, I didn’t find anything that piqued my interest—too many [insert name here] Springs and [insert name here] Crossroads—then I simply searched harder, as one would in a Where’s Waldo? book. Lo and behold, a curious place name always popped up. I would then mark it on the map, and when I zoomed out, I had 36 new landmarks by which to plot new routes.
In the fall of 2024, I set out again. Of course, I would still stay away from pre-Googling anything about the town other than its location. That is, I would wheel into each town only with wild imagination, rather than actual knowledge (e.g., “Stringfellow must have been named after a skinny man.” “They must have found something pretty good in Eureka.”), and I’d conduct real research, if necessary, only after the visit.
I would also continue to exclude most of the standard suffixes—the -boros, -villes, -burgs, and -tons, as well as oronyms (names of hills and mountains) and hydronyms (names of bodies of water). So, I’d have to leave all those wonderfully-named swamps (Bug Swamp, Puddin’ Swamp, Hellhole Swamp, etc.) for another adventure, another day.
Of course, no South Carolina place name list could be complete without honoring the many wonderful place names derived from indigenous peoples—Coosawatchie, Socastee, Yemassee, Waccamaw, to name but a few. However, because these names are often exonyms (names used by outsiders), rather than autonyms (names used by insiders), I choose to leave those for researchers with more academic expertise.
During my second South Carolina place names road trip—a 450-mile-plus journey, in October of 2024, to Blue Brick, Ruby, Birdtown, Lucknow, Lone Star, Privateer, and Sardinia—I got hooked, and I knew I was onto something larger than another magazine article. I had met so many wonderful people, who reminded me that place names are the great passwords that unlock history and personal memory. I needed to make this an ongoing project.
For even though many of these places were long past their heyday, and some had even become ghost towns, what lives on is the name, and the voices of the people who speak that name and call it home. They are the people who would answer Juliet’s question thus: “What’s in a name, you ask? Everything.”
--Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, II.ii.43-44
Had Juliet been a real South Carolinian, rather than a fictional Veronese, she might not have posed such a philosophical question in the famous play bearing her name. Ashepoo, Honea Path, Tega Cay, Fountain Inn, Daufuskie—it’s hard to imagine South Carolina being so sweet without such words decorating our maps and serving as our landmarks.
Like most writers, I am obsessed with toponymy—the study of place names that shape our awareness of who we are and where we are—and so, in February of 2021, I embarked on what I can only call a “South Carolina place name road trip.” I logged over 800 miles—roughly the distance from Columbia, South Carolina to Columbia, Missouri—to learn about the origins of ten of the state’s most intriguingly-named places: Round O, North, Plum Branch, Ninety Six, Due West, Possum Kingdom, Cross Anchor, Prosperity, Coward, and Ketchuptown.
The article “Place Names”—a series of 10 vignettes about my experience in each town—appeared in the December 2021 online issue of South Carolina Living. You can read it as it originally appeared HERE.
My inspiration for such an article had been two unusual hardbacks on my bookshelf: George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place Naming in the United States (1945); and Claude and Irene Neuffer’s Correct Mispronunciations of Some South Carolina Names (1983). From these two books, let me quote two lines revealing why I was interested in such a project:
Stewart: “Yet the names [in America] had grown out of the life, and the life-blood, of all those who had gone before. From the names might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune, and another joked, twisting an old name to make a new one.”
Neuffers: “In no way can we claim that this little lexicon is definitive. In some cases we have discussed the origin of a name for no better reason than that it pleased us to do so.”
As much as I subscribed to Stewart’s philosophy, my investigation, like the Neuffers, wasn’t academic research. I am a regional magazine writer by trade, and this road trip was only the means to an end. I knew that colorful town names would lead me down colorful backroads to colorful places and colorful people. And local color, of course, is what needs to fill up a magazine like South Carolina Living.
An academic might call place names something like “linguistic legacies of culture and migration,” but for a magazine writer, they are simply great conversation starters. To ask someone about the town’s name is as fruitful as asking them about where to find the town’s best cheeseburger. The next thing you know, you are talking about rabbit hunting or training horses or the last passenger train to come through town.
Of course, much of history is Google-able these days, but I wanted to hear it in the words of the people. My goal was to interview a diverse cross-section of regional historians, local know-it-alls, area raconteurs, and random passerby. The old waters may have dried up, the railroads decommissioned, the battles long over, but town names live on. I wanted to know, simply, if people still knew why.
What I found out is that the origin of a town’s name often remains a mystery. Of the five people I talked to in Adam’s Run, for instance, none could tell me who Adam was, nor why he might have been running. But I also found that place names, like food, are gateways into our political and natural histories—they remind us of features in the landscape, of occurrences in particular spots, of honored leaders and homelands.
After my trip, however, there remained plenty of towns that I had not visited, but which still tantalized me on the South Carolina map. Blue Brick, Trio, Eureka, Lone Star, Stringfellow, Bucklick, Climax, Goat Alley, Giant…to name but a few.
I also happened to notice that, either by coincidence or design, each of the ten places I visited for the first article was located in a different South Carolina county. This, then, gave me a new idea and a system. I would pore over the South Carolina atlas of the other 36 counties, hunting the most interesting place name in each. If, at first, I didn’t find anything that piqued my interest—too many [insert name here] Springs and [insert name here] Crossroads—then I simply searched harder, as one would in a Where’s Waldo? book. Lo and behold, a curious place name always popped up. I would then mark it on the map, and when I zoomed out, I had 36 new landmarks by which to plot new routes.
In the fall of 2024, I set out again. Of course, I would still stay away from pre-Googling anything about the town other than its location. That is, I would wheel into each town only with wild imagination, rather than actual knowledge (e.g., “Stringfellow must have been named after a skinny man.” “They must have found something pretty good in Eureka.”), and I’d conduct real research, if necessary, only after the visit.
I would also continue to exclude most of the standard suffixes—the -boros, -villes, -burgs, and -tons, as well as oronyms (names of hills and mountains) and hydronyms (names of bodies of water). So, I’d have to leave all those wonderfully-named swamps (Bug Swamp, Puddin’ Swamp, Hellhole Swamp, etc.) for another adventure, another day.
Of course, no South Carolina place name list could be complete without honoring the many wonderful place names derived from indigenous peoples—Coosawatchie, Socastee, Yemassee, Waccamaw, to name but a few. However, because these names are often exonyms (names used by outsiders), rather than autonyms (names used by insiders), I choose to leave those for researchers with more academic expertise.
During my second South Carolina place names road trip—a 450-mile-plus journey, in October of 2024, to Blue Brick, Ruby, Birdtown, Lucknow, Lone Star, Privateer, and Sardinia—I got hooked, and I knew I was onto something larger than another magazine article. I had met so many wonderful people, who reminded me that place names are the great passwords that unlock history and personal memory. I needed to make this an ongoing project.
For even though many of these places were long past their heyday, and some had even become ghost towns, what lives on is the name, and the voices of the people who speak that name and call it home. They are the people who would answer Juliet’s question thus: “What’s in a name, you ask? Everything.”
