1985: The Music of Feliciana Names

This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 1985 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.

Some of them sing a straightforward and simple melody: Live Oak, Oak Grove, Bush Hill, Beechwood, The Oaks, Fairview, Mulberry Hill, places named with the same artless ease that calls a white puppy with one black mark Spot. 

Some are inspired by distant climes and foreign tongues: Raccourci, the French word for a route shorter than the one normally taken, a cut-off; a raptly watched European drama entitled Rosedown; Jacko, corrupted from the African name Quaco, meaning a male born on Wednesday, and given to a free man of color and to the land he owned back in Spanish times; Catalpa, a Choctaw word meaning divided and given to a tree with a broad-fingered leaf; Sligo, the Irish birthplace of owner Daniel Clark, Sr.; Panola, another Choctaw word meaning cotton, and Angola, a slave-trading port in Africa, both significant to Isaac Franklin, a slave-trader turned planter who owned all the land now used as the Louisiana State Penal Farm. 

Myth shrouds the origin of some place names. The legendary old washerwoman is named Sara or Sarah, depending on whether the teller was of Spanish or English background, who toiled on the banks of the bayou called by that name, when actually Sarah was a Virginia-born High Tory surnamed Truly who took up a British land grant at the stream's headwaters during the American Revolution. Years before, French soldiers with earthy humor waded in the shallow waters on a hot summer’s day and made bad jokes about Chaude Pisse. British soldiers thought the same thing and called the stream Clap’s Bayou. We who are more delicate and speak French neither willingly nor well call it Bayou Sara Creek. 

And Thompson’s Creek, named for a very early British grantee along its banks, Richard Thompson, said by some to have been the first English-speaking settler in British West Florida. His creek was renamed Rio Feliciana, River of the Happy Land, by later Spanish overlords, and called Bayou des Ecors after the steep cliffs at its mouth by the Acadians whom the Spanish settled, or tried to settle on its banks. And Feliciana itself, was it named simply to augur a good life in a happy land, or was it so called to honor the beautiful Felicite, wife of its Spanish conqueror? 

In the old frontier days, landholders wresting a footing in a hostile environment gave little thought to fanciful names. It was Higgins’s Old Field, or Sholar’s Bottom, or Weem’s Toadvine Tract, the Boone Place, or the Magazine Tract. In the 1830’s, when novels romanticized the colonial plantation life, the emerging planting aristocracy took to naming their estates. Sir Walter Scott foreshadowed a culture and brought forth Waverly, and Haynie’s Thicket became China Lodge and later the more or less meaningless Rosale. Oliver Goldsmith’s vicar inspired Wakefield; Oakley appeared on the letters addressed to Eliza Pirrie Bowman; the Brandons of Arcole celebrated a Napoleonic victory; Greenwood crowned a rise with glistening white pillars. 

Captain Mulford, who as a young lieutenant was sent to apprehend Aaron Burr at the Tombigbee, quit the U.S. Army for the planting life at Soldier's Retreat. One of the multitudinous descendants of the Puritan divine, the Rev. Jedediah Smith, mellowed gracefully at Rural Retirement. There appeared on ownership maps Sleepy Hollow, and Cheerful Valley (surely one of the most mellifluous names ever sounded), and Deserta, Solitude, Galilee Hill, Solitaire, The Alps, Ambrosia (named for its original settler Thomas Ambrose by a thoughtful lady who later went mad), Como, Elm Park, Oakland, Evergreen, Laurel Hill, Westmoreland. 

Some plantation names are so evocative they scorn explanation: Inheritance, which to Daniel Turnbull was just that; Independence, which celebrated a slave woman’s new-found freedom; Beulah, the land of milk and honey, lying just next to Misery, and both owned by the same family; Spring Grove had to buy to settle an unfortunate family matter: Ouida, named for the pseudonymous writer of turgid 19th-century romances. 

Some names have escaped into the vernacular, like Irondale, originally Arundel, named obscurely for English earls and their castles or perhaps for a county in Maryland and nonetheless meaningless to the unlettered folk who subsequently dwelt there. And in the Weyanoke neighborhood, a name known only to old timers: Bunkurn Corner, more properly Buncombe but pronounced the same. Early settlers knew it as the name of a North Carolina country from which many of them sprang: to nineteenth-century residents the name meant a significant nothingless; claptrap, and came from and incredibly irrelevant and windy Congressman who told his colleagues he was “talking only for Buncombe” and not addressing them. 

And so they sing, these Feliciana place names, a contrapuntal harmony of dreams and aspirations, pretensions, and sentimentality, simplicity and practicality. And even so today. We named our place Westerlie for no better reason than it lay on the west side of highway and lane, and the wind more often than not blew from that direction.