NOM DE PLUMEWhat's in a name? Less and less that is Illinoisan in most parts of the state Essay by James Krohe Ir. Illustration by Daisy Juarez No, wrote Eliza Steele, she hadn't been "travelling in a balloon," even though her tour had taken her to Marseilles, Florence, Naples, Liverpool, Brussels and Rome. Those "worn-out European designations" identified the towns along the Illinois River that she visited by steamboat in 1840. Placeness is at the heart of human community, but Illinois place names have never had much Illinois in them. A whopping percentage of the state's town names are what are known to toponymists, or students of place names, as transfer names, meaning names of old places given to new places. Newcomers to Illinois brought their memories of heroes, their stories of derring-do with them, much as they brought their Bibles and their beds, and honored them by attaching those names to their new homes. Thus the slightly secondhand quality of so many Illinois place names. Pittsfield was named for settlers from Pittsfield, Mass., upon its founding. Aurora is the namesake of Aurora, N.Y. Driving to Beardstown from Springfield 12 / July/August 1997 Illinois Issues The power to name is an expression of political power over the civil realm. takes one through Philadelphia and Virginia. As a boy I joked that this was going the long way. This cemented my reputation as a wit among the 8-yearolds in the back seat, but the jest said more than I realized at the time: Illinois has always been home to displaced persons (not excluding most Native Americans) who came here from other places, and who named much of what they found in memory of, or at least in the language of, home. To Steele's worn out European designations we can add Peru, Havana, Belgium Row, Detroit, Deny, Montezuma, York, Pekin, New Hanover, Baden, Berlin, Hebron, Harvard. Genoa, El Paso, Dundee and dozens more. If the pioneers remembered in names the places they used to know but left, we seek in names places we never knew but wished to. Home buyers in DuPage County indulge their fantasies as they line up to buy house models with names like the Edinborough or the Falkirk or to lodge in projects known as Tartans Glen, Donovan Glen, or Heather Glen, even though — maybe because — most of the local glens have had shopping malls built on them. Of course, in the '90s all places are real estate. Just as new places are endowed with ersatz, but marketable history, so old places are stripped of their real history. The Chicago Daily News Building, the Corn Exchange, the Jewelers Building, the Peoples Gas Company Building, the Montgomery Ward and Co. Building — each evokes Chicago's rich commercial history. But while history may be a virtue in a name, it is not in a property. No self- respecting firm wishes to lease space in a building that bears the name of another. As companies move or go under or merge, their namesake buildings often are renamed. Or rather unnamed — each of the above landmarks is now known by its street address. Easier to find, perhaps, but somehow smaller. This restless revising of identity is the bloodless, political form of ethnic cleansing practiced by successive dominant, but insecure, cultures. Native Americans named Illinois first, of course. The names that survive — Piscasaw, Kishwaukee, Mascouta — have almost no equal in music. (The Indians' name for the Spoon River was Amequeon, or ladle.) But most Indian names were discarded in favor of European versions that were easier to spell or pronounce or (probably most significant) were less Indian. What the first European Illinoisans did to Native Americans, their descendants are busy doing to each other. The politically correct, for example, seek to vanquish the remnants of our primitive forebears as ruthlessly as some of their ancestors did the Sauk or Illini. As then, the means is a willful amnesia. Nigger Lake in Mason County has long since disappeared from most maps, and only a rude foreigner — the Cambridge Gazetteer of the U.S. and Canada in this case — dares say in print that Bridgeport, the spiritual home of the Irish in Illinois, used to be known as Cabbagetown.
Having rendered the real Illinois banal, our generation feels all the more keenly the need to connect to an exotic and inspiring past, even if, perhaps especially if, it is not the real past. White people, having rejected real Indian names, are now giving new Native American names to old Illinois places. The former Joliet arsenal is now known as the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Midewin (pronounced mi-DAY-win) is not, as one might expect, the Algonquin for "surplus." It is Potawatomi for "healing society," a choice that smacks more of marketing than of medicine. Local names are the cultural genes that transmit our fractious history, signifiers of a past that usually is recalled only by groups aggrieved by it. Anyone with a sensible desire to avoid controversy naturally shrinks from using them. Illinois' community college and regional library systems introduced a new level to the hierarchy of places in the state, and with it chances to inculcate consciousness of place on a new scale. Unfortunately, the library systems may be regional but the names of the places within them are local. As it is impossible to name the whole after any one part without offending the other parts, the Illinois Issues July/August 1997 / 13 system's founders opted for names — Alliance, Heritage Trail, Lewis & dark, Lincoln Trail, Rolling Prairie — that mean nothing to anyone, and thus offend no one.
Alas, names often are the only survivals of the state's history. Times change, memories fade. Progress stumbles forward. Chestnut Hill attests to Illinois' ecological decline, as do the state's many Panther Creeks. Developers persist in naming projects after what they destroyed to build them. Many a name exists only in the scholarly record. (We might adapt the tourism slogan of a few years ago to read, "Just inside the library, there's a place called Illinois.") America, platted in 1818 on a spot on the Ohio River upriver from Cairo and briefly a county seat, had a brick jail and a courthouse, which in the Illinois of those days was as much worth bragging about as a Barnes & Noble is today. But a sandbar blocked the landing, malaria sickened the residents and, by 1843, the town site was so empty it was put to the plow. Road and place names from the 19th century thus have become to our civilization what hieroglyphs were to the Egypt of the Middle Kingdom — clues to a dead world. Every Illinois burg of pretension south of U.S. 136 boasts a street named after Henry Clay, for example, but to the typical Illinoisan Clay is as mysterious a figure as the state comptroller. The state's history may never have been common knowledge, but today it is little more than a coterie interest, a pastime of the overeducated and under- occupied, like collecting Wedgewood or running for the Senate. Most Americans not only do not miss the history they don't know, but resent being expected to know it. Who besides architecture buffs knows the exCorn Exchange was ever called the Corn Exchange to begin with? Does it really 14 / July/August 1997 Illinois Issues
matter to anyone living in a West Side housing project that Garfield Park was not named for the cat? (Or, we must ask, that it was named for a president?)
The manufactured, the contrived, the marketed is the real in an advanced consumer culture. Besides, the ability to make up your own history is quintessentially American, expressed in such quintessentially American projects as the Schaumburg Town Centre — a prefabricated downtown for a prefabricated town. Being free to invent new places as well as to move to them — that's liberty! James Krohe Jr. is a contributing editor of Illinois Issues. He was raised in a place renamed Springfield, III., and now is a free-lance writer in a place named Portland, Ore. Illinois Issues July/August 1997 / 15 |
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