As summer keeps broiling along, chuckles can serve as a calming cooler. Refreshing highway humor lurks in a breezy book titled Arkansas Place Names: From Apt to Zinc by Way of Oil Trough, Toad Suck, Smackover and Ink.
Written by the late Ernie Deane, an Arkansas Gazette columnist of renown, the vintage paperback is out of print but can be found at Amazon.com and elsewhere online. Its section on "Unusual and Amusing Names" enshrines the whimsy that once went into labeling locales that were often just dots on the map. Blink and you may miss them on the way through. Here's a sampler:
• Apt. Railroad construction created this Craighead County community after the Civil War. When locals were trying to figure out a name, someone observed that the rail company would be "apt to name us." The name stuck.
• Birdeye. Other tiny places could have received the name of this Cross County location. It is said to have stuck because the place was "no bigger than a bird's eye" on the map.
• Bloomer. Local lore attributes this Sebastian County moniker to travelers having sighted a pair of bloomers hanging on a clothesline. The name might also have evolved from "boomer," a slang term for land-hungry adventurers who pressured the federal government to open Oklahoma's Indian Territory to white settlers.
• Bug Scuffle Church. This site in Washington County is said to have been so named because several men waiting outside a revival meeting watched two bugs fight over a pellet of manure. Betting started on which bug would win the scuffle.
• Buttermilk. When a church of rough-cut planks was erected by Pope County Presbyterians in the 1840s, the whitewash applied instead of paint got damaged in a heavy rain. Someone said the whitewash looked like buttermilk, thus the name.
• Cow Faced Hill. A man walking on a dark night in Benton County, passed a hill where someone had earlier been murdered, was badly frightened when he thought he saw a ghost. The apparition turned out on subsequent inquiry to have been a white-faced cow.
• Fly Gap. This pass through the Boston Mountains in Franklin County by local lore derived its name from the swarms of flies attracted to the moonshine liquor stills in the vicinity.
• Hominy. Mispronunciation in local parlance turned the name of a Hempstead County settlement from "Harmony" to the corny "Hominy."
• Ink. When a post office was OK'd for this Polk County crossroads, the local schoolmarm was told to ask the parents of her pupils for a name. Sending notes to their homes, she worried that names written in pencil would be hard to decipher. So she instructed, "Write in ink." Enough parents took her instruction literally that "Ink" it was. Or so the story goes.
• Oil Trough. The odorous antebellum practice of rendering bear fat for cosmetics and other uses led to the name of this Independence County hamlet. To transport the oil by river down to New Orleans, logs were hollowed and shaped into floating troughs.
• Pickles Gap. Local lore attributes the provenance of Pickles Gap to a long-ago accident in which a barrel of pickles rolled off a wagon and broke open at the site in Faulkner County. Or there may have been settlers named Pickle.
• Rocky Comfort. The first seat of Little River County just after the Civil War, Rocky Comfort was the translation of an American Indian name. It referred to spring water running through the local limestone rock to form a tree-shaded spot that gave comfort to bison in the area.
• Smackover. A Union County oil-boom town in the 1920s, Smackover appears to have been an English corruption of the French term "chemin couvert" (covered way), referring to a trail overhung with tree limbs. Contrary to local legend, it did not refer to oil blowing "smack over the derrick."
• Snowball. Asked by residents to name the Searcy County town "Snow Hall" in honor of a local leader, the U.S. Post Office headquarters in Washington apparently slipped up and called it "Snowball" instead.
• Toad Suck. The popular Toad Suck Festival has given some cachet to this spot on the border of Faulkner and Perry counties. The name supposedly derives from weekend drinking sprees along the Arkansas River by revelers who were said to "soak up whiskey like a toad."
• Umpire. When baseball was introduced to the Howard County community of Busby just after the Civil War, one player explained the unfamiliar game's rules, including the role of the umpire. A bystander is said to have suggested that Umpire would make a better name than Busby. And so the call was made.
Style on 07/23/2019