by Vernon Pizer

The little known agency that tried to make Pittsburgh drop its "h" has had successes, too.

This article was located in an issue of the Southwest Virginia Genealogical Society's journal, Virginia Appalachian Notes, dated about 1990. The full citation was inadvertently not recorded.

[Virginia Appalachian Notes Editor's note: This article appeared in the Jan 1980 issue of the the American Legion magazine, and they have given us permission to reprint the article and the art work. At first we thought that we would omit some of the article but on rereading it, we could not decide just what to omit -- so here is the article in full. Our thanks to the American Legion magazine.]

Not so long ago a group of federal officials assembled around a conference table in Washington and literally made a mountain out of a mole hill. This happened at a regular meeting of the Domestic Names Committee of the US Board on Geographic Names and one of the agenda items was a request from the town of Mole Hill, WV, that it be renamed Mountain. The Committee considered the matter and sanctioned the change.

But if there are moments of lightness in BGN proceedings, it is not a fun-and-games operation. The Board is the arbiter of the nation's nearly four million place names and of the federally accepted version of the uncounted millions of foreign names, including the labels pinned on topographic features on seabeds and on extraterrestrial bodies. With a mandate extending from the smallest crossroads hamlet to the far side of distant planets, its decisions affect legal, political, economic, academic, and even military matters.

At the outbreak of World War II, when the US urgently needed worldwide maps with standardized place-names to forestall confusion among its own forces and between itself and its allies -- a monumental undertaking complicated by the requirement for devising ways to render in the Roman alphabet such non-Roman systems as Japanese, Arabic, Chinese and Russian -- it was BGN that leaped into the breach.

Remarkably, BGN has achieved the ultimate state of grace that zealots of economy in government dream about. It has no staff, no budget and no facilities of its own, at least in a technical sense. It exists entirely on no-fat-on-the-bone handouts from other federal agencies. The Board's operations are directed by Dr. Richard R. Randall, who also serves as geographer of the Defense Mapping agency, assisted by a staff of 27 who are carried on Department of Defense and Department of Interior rolls. They work out of a handful of offices scrounged from the US Naval Observatory and from the US Geological Survey.

It is entirely fitting that the Board should be unique among government agencies -- it was created to cope with a unique situation. It stemmed from the long-ago day in 1513 when Ponce de Leon made landfall off a peninsula in the New World and dubbed it Florida, the oldest geographic name of European origin still in use in the nation. "Ponce de Leon started the country off on a naming jag that never ran out of steam," Dick Randall observes. "Few who followed in his footsteps were immune to the bite of the place-name bug." Explorers, settlers, soldiers, woodsmen, all showered the face of the land with whatever geographic labels struck their fancy.

Take, for instance, the Spanish explorers in what would become Colorado, who named a river El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, "the river of souls lost in purgatory," because many of their party were slain there by Comanches. French trappers who followed the Spaniards truncated the long, storytelling name and gave it a French accent by recasting it as Purgatoire. English-speaking settlers altered it once more, making it more comfortable on Anglo-Saxon tongues by transmuting it to Picketwire.

Or consider the place in Massachusetts that the Indians called Shamut. When the white men arrived they ignored Shamut and adopted Trimountain in its stead, but only 10 years later they dropped Trimountain and replaced it with Boston. To the south was a Connecticut site that Indians called Quinnipiac after an adjacent river, but Dutch surveyors laying out a town there chose a new name, Rodenberghen. When the English displaced the Dutch they erased Rodenberghen from the map, restoring Quinnipiac. A short time later they had second thoughts and relabeled the place New Haven.

After the westward expansion began in earnest, place-naming went from fever to epidemic, often with bizarre consequences. Settlers putting down their roots at the mouth of the Licking River in Ohio christened the place Columbia but almost at once a scholar among them engineered a switch to a new name he coined. His linguistic invention started with L for Licking River; then added os, Greek for "mouth "; anti, Latin for "opposite"; and ville, French for "city "; ending up with Losantiville -- "city opposite the mouth of the Licking River." Two years later, General Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory and devoted member of the patriotic Society of the Cincinnati, arrived for an official inspection. His first words were, "Damn it, Losantiville is a terrible name. Change it to Cincinnati."

If St Clair was forthright, Archibald Yell was devious. Yell, running for Congress from Shawneetown, Ark, was being pressed by a local rival for the same seat. Theorizing that if he could get Shawneetown to rename itself for him the resulting publicity would translate into votes, Yell slipped $50 to some go-betweens to promote the switch. The ploy worked and Shawneetown became Yellsville. It would be nice to say that tainted politics never succeed, but the truth is that Archibald Yell of Yellsville went to the nation's capital.

Slowly it began to dawn on government officials that the nation's haphazard, freewheeling approach to place-naming was tripping it up. So many places had dubbed themselves Lafayette to honor the Revolutionary hero that mail, goods and travelers were forever ending up in the wrong one. Ensnared in the tangle, harried postal authorities cried out, "Enough! No more Lafayettes!" This was a challenge many could not resist -- there was an outpouring of such variants as Lafayette Hill, Lafayette Springs, Fayette, Fayette City and Fayetteville.

Even if the Frenchman had stayed home there still would have been plenty of thorns in the thicket of American place-names. There were scores of Washingtons, Franklins, Manchesters, Newports, Alexandrias. Fifty places were named Cedar. Seventy-five were named Summit, and 20 states had more than one Summit within their borders. Indiana had two towns named Scipio only 50 miles from one another. Mount Tabor, NC, and Mount Tabor, SC, were confused with one another so consistently that, in desperation, the South Carolinians dropped their Mount and turned their Tabor backwards to become Robat.

To make a bad situation worse, numerous places went by several different names simultaneously. To begin with, a town would have the title adopted for it by its municipal authorities but its post office might, and frequently did, bear a quite different designation assigned by postal officials. Meanwhile, its railroad station often bore yet another name bestowed by the railroad serving the town, and, if there were a local military post or lighthouse, the departments responsible for them might list their locations by place-names unique to them alone. Finally, if the community served as a county seat, the county authorities often had their own designation for the place, as in the case of the West Virginia town that county officials insisted was Raleigh Court House, while the city fathers were adamant in proclaiming that it was Beckley.

Alarmed by the topsy-turvy situation, President Benjamin Harrison issued an executive directive in 1890 creating the US Board of Geographic Names to bring order out of the chaos. It was that directive that established the Board's unique position as Washington bureaucracy's scrounger, because in it Harrison specified that BGN "shall entail no expense on the Government." He appointed 10 members to the Board from other federal departments, instructing the parent bodies to continue their salaries. He had not, of course, invented a way of creating a cost-free agency, but by having others foot the bill he played a budgetary shell-game that produced that illusion.

In its first year, BGN tackled two different tasks. First, it devised a set of principles for the form and spelling of place-names. Second, it considered 2,000 cases in which places were identified by more than one name and decided which was the proper designation.

The decision was usually accepted calmly enough because BGN tried, with reasonable success, to select the name enjoying widest usage and strongest public support. If it ignored local wishes -- as it did when it chose Porto Rico over Puerto Rico -- the cries of protest were instantaneous and loud. In the case of Porto Rico the cries did not abate for nearly 50 years until Congress, taking the matter out of the Board's hands, passed a bill restoring the name to Puerto Rico. On the whole, though, BGN's efforts to hack clearings through the wild linguistic growth usually went fairly smoothly.

It was a different story with the principles laid down for the place-name forms. Nobody quarreled with the objectives: simplification and streamlining. It was the way the goal was to be achieved that raised hackles. Most of the objections focused on two BGN edicts: that names ending in "burgh" drop their h to become "burg," and that apostrophes be eliminated so that a place like Miller's Lake would become Millers Lake. Of the two, the h drew first blood.

There were at that time a half-dozen towns around the country that had styled themselves Pittsburgh in mimicry of the original in Pa. They groused for a while and then, concluding that resistance was futile, dropped their h to become Pittsburg. The Pennsylvanians were made of sterner stuff. It was not just pride of authorship, but more because many of the early settlers were Scots. In fashioning their municipal title they had given it a typically Scottish ending of burgh to remind of their heritage. If "burg" was unmistakably German -- as in Hamburg and Brandenburg -- and the Pennsylvanians balked at hiding their Scottish light under a German bushel. So they dug in their heels and fought the BGN edict, backed by a vigorous editorial campaign in the local press. Federal maps, documents and post offices dropped the city's h but residents stubbornly continued to use it in all correspondence. Municipal leaders enlisted the aid of Pa.'s congressmen to pressure the Board to reverse its ruling, but it declined.

Both sides were adamant and the stand-off persisted year after year. Not until 1932, in a report to President Hoover, did the Board wearily raise the white flag of surrender, conceding that Pittsburgh was entitled to its h.

The seemingly innocuous apostrophe was to become as troublesome for BGN as the h. At first it seemed that the public would agree docilely to relinquish its apostrophes. In one year alone -- 1894 -- postal authorities industriously pruned 1,665 apostrophes from post office names. Mapmakers, railroads, educators, editors and publishers fell in line, snipping away at the grammatical mark. The affected places themselves, bowing to the inevitable, followed suit. Except Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

The Vineyarders doted on their apostrophe. It had been theirs ever since 1642 when Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold discovered the island and named it for its lush growth of wild grapevines and for his daughter, Martha. The Vineyarders refused resolutely to relinquish their three-century-old apostrophe. Flaunting it like a battle flag, they counter-attacked through the press, through citizen lobbies and through their elected officials. It took a long time but ultimately, like the Pittsburghers, they were victorious. By coincidence, it was in its 1932 report to President Hoover -- the same one in which it tossed in the towel on the Pittsburgh h -- that the Board announced its surrender on the Martha's Vineyard apostrophe.

With the files closed on those two nagging issues, the BGN staff breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was premature. A new storm broke out in the north.

Thompson's Point, VT, had been stripped of both its apostrophe and its s, being converted to simply Thompson Point. Never reconciled to the amputation, the residents now launched an offensive to recapture their missing linguistic parts. The Board refused to lift its ban but the voices of protest would not be silenced. Finally, in 1964, BGN relented to the extent of restoring the s while holding fast to the apostrophe. Thompsons Point was only a half-victory that did not satisfy the Pointers; they continued to press their campaign. Four years later, the Vermont legislature joined the fray officially by voting unanimous approval of Thompson's Point, with the cherished curlicue firmly in place, as the town's authentic name. The Board was unmoved by the action. The matter is still unresolved, both sides still entrenched on opposite flanks of the disputed little mark.

"I know it must make us sound like bureaucratic nincompoops," Randall says ruefully, "but there is good reason for our obstinacy. We ban apostrophes in place-names because on a map they can be misread as topographic marks, causing confusion. This is especially true on nautical charts where an apostrophe is often mistaken as an indication of rocks."

The fact is that as the nation's arbiter of its place-names the Board frequently finds itself in a damned-if-we-do-and-damned-if-we-don't dilemma. Cape Canaveral demonstrates how it can wind up in a no-win situation. In 1963, Pres. Lyndon Johnson asked BGN to redesignate the Fla. cape as Cape Kennedy to honor his assassinated predecessor in office. Complying with the White House request, the Board made the change. But Canaveral was so firmly entrenched among Floridians that they refused to go along with the switch. The issue was debated in the state legislature, which voted for retention of Canaveral as the authorized name for all except the portion of the cape under federal control for operation of the space flight center. Later, when Pres. Johnson was occupied with other problems, BGN quietly rescinded its order.

Involvement in place-name disputes is no novelty to Dick Randall -- he was born into one. At the time of his birth, Seattle was rent by a move to rename Mount Rainier, its famous landmark, a proposal the Randalls opposed vigorously. "That mountain was named for an ancestor of mine; in fact, my middle name is Rainier," he explains. "So I am delighted that we balked the change."

One recent change that did go through brought Randall and his colleagues at BGN a spate of good-natured ribbing, including coast-to-coast quips by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It grew out of the Board's laudable undertaking to eliminate offensive or derogatory place-names, an effort that has erased such indignities as Jap Mountain. (BGN, however, achieved only cosmetic improvement with another mountain; resistance to elimination of the earthy name of this outhouse-shaped rock formation was so strong that the Board succeeded only in truncating it to S. H. Mountain.)

What drew the recent coast-to-coast chuckles was BGN's treatment of an Oregon site noted for an establishment where the world's oldest profession was plied. The Board altered the place-name from Whorehouse Meadow to Naughty Girl Meadow.

But a current place-name issue is not generating chuckles for anyone. It arises from an Alaska request to BGN to revert to Mount McKinley's original Indian name, Denali. Because the modern name of the continent's highest peak honors the Ohio-born 25th president, the Ohio Congressional delegation has risen in defense of its native son. At present, the controversy is swirling through the halls of Congress, with both Alaska and Ohio pressing for support of their opposing points of view. Hoping it will not be scorched by this political hot potato, the Board is maintaining a discreetly low profile in the matter.

In an average month the Board renders some 100 decisions on domestic place-names and those generating the heat of a Pittsburgh, a Canaveral or a McKinley are the exception. That is fortunate because now BGN faces a challenge from abroad that is taxing its lean resources -- Pinyin, the new system adopted this year by the People's Republic of China for rendering Chinese names in the Roman alphabet. Pinyin confronts geographers with complexities on a par equal with those most of us would face if suddenly we had to adopt the metric and Celsius systems in place of our familiar units of measurement. In Pinyin, Peking becomes Beijing, Canton becomes Guangzhou, Sinkiang becomes Xinjiang, and Tibet is Xizang. "It's the biggest problem we've ever faced," Randall exclaims. "We have to alter all our place-names on China as the Chinese release the new Pinyin forms. We are working on the 18,000 they have released so far but the total will probably run over a million."

The arrival of Pinyin can bring no cheer to Vermont. Confronted by the enormity of its Chinese challenge, the BGN is unlikely any time soon to reconsider the plea for restoration of the Thompsons Point apostrophe.