Appreciation: Names on the Land

Kudos to New York Review of Books for bringing back George R. Stewart's Names on the Land (original copyright 1945), surely one of the most affable books ever written, perfect for fending off night sweats. Stewart must have been one of the most affable professors who ever lived--a breed who doesn't exist much of anywhere any more who mixed kind of father-knows-best gentility and gentleness with a bit of honest acculturation. I bet he showed up from time to time at the student dining hall and rooted for the home team at football. He was nominally a professor of English, but as Matt Weiland observes in an appreciative introduction, he was also a pioneer in the teaching of California history--surely his most enduring work is Ordeal by Hunger, the most durable history of the Donner Party.

Names on the Land is just what it purports to be: an account of place names and how they came to be. A superficial reader could dismiss it as mere antiquarianism but it is a good deal more than that: Stewart understood how to weave a good deal of social history into the warp and woof of his material. We learn a lot about patterns of exploration of settlement; about the ethnic patchwork; about fashions in imitation and aspiration (I am pretty sure he is wrong, however, on the etymology of "borough" and "burgh"). We also get a humbling lesson in the accidental nature of fame:

Besides Washington, only three Revolutionary heroes won the honor of large cities. They were Knox the gunner, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and Frances Nash, whom nobody remembers. ... The story of Nash is this. On a foggy morning in 1777 General Washington launched an attack upon Lord Howe at Germantown. The sudden advance of the Continentals sent the British light infantry rolling back. Then, the defense stiffened and held. Confused in the fog, the American regiments lost contact and fired into one another. In a desperate attempt to restore the line, the Norrh Carolina brigade pushed forward from the reserve under its youthful commander, General Francis Nash. A cannonball struck him down and he was carried dying form the lost field. His own state honored him, and three years later a stockade in its western lands was called Nashborough. In 1784 it followed the fashion by shifting to Nashville.

--George R. Stewart, Names on the Land 199 (NYRB Edition 2008)

It's a mercy they haven't changed it to Presleyburg.