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Entries in irony (2)

Thursday
May242012

Blue Highways: Conquest and Cato, New York

Unfolding the Map

If you're a map lover, or you like stories about where towns get their names, or you are into irony, then there's something of each in this post.  If you love all three, you've hit the jackpot!  We'll pass through Conquest and Cato with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), and then move on.  But before we do, see where these places are located by referencing the map.

Book Quote

"Off I went, hoping Conquest would find me.  In the dairy country, chewing Holsteins and Guernseys switched their tails and flicked their skins.  On the other side of Johnny Cake Road lay Conquest.  Then I began the game again, looking for Cato.  Along the roads were cottage industries selling clothesline poles, purple martin houses, potted plants, AKC pups."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 8

Sign depicting the intersection of Cato, Ira, Victory and Conquest, New York. Photo by "Dougtone" and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host page.

Conquest and Cato, New York

Sometimes you wonder how towns got their names, especially if those names are interesting.  Many towns are named in honor of people, some are taken from place names already in the area, some are named after cities of antiquity.  In fact, as we travel with LHM through this area, we'll find cities like Palmyra, New York, named after an ancient city in Syria, and Syracuse, New York, named after a city established by the ancient Greeks on the island of Sicily.

I have two directions that I'm going to go in this post.  One of my previous posts explored city names with an ironic twist.  In the case of Conquest and Cato, there is an irony.  I think that LHM thought he was looking at a little bit of irony when he mentioned in Blue Highways that Conquest is just down the road from Victory.  But there's even more irony here than that, but it's a little convoluted.

First, Cato.  Cato is one of a number of towns established in a large tract of land, called the Central New York Military Tract, that was reserved for ownership and settlement by New York veterans of the Revolutionary War.  The idea of setting land aside was conceived by the U.S. Congress to compensate veterans, and was to consist of 100 acres of land per soldier.  However, New York was slow in getting this land together, so the state legislature set an additional 500 acres per land, for a total of 600 per soldier, in a series of 28 contiguous townships in the middle of the state.

The townships were allegedly named by a clerk in the New York Surveyor General's office, who was an avid reader of classical literature.  Thus, the township name of Cato was joined by other townships named Lysander, Hannibal, Brutus, Camillus, Cicero, Manlius, Aurelius, Marcellus, Pompey, Romulus, Scipio, Sempronius, Tully, Fabius, Ovid, Milton, Locke, Homer, Solon, Hector, Ulysses, Dryden, Virgil, Cincinnatus, Junius, Galen and Sterling.

Conquest was a settlement within the township of Cato, but became independent of Cato after a political dispute.  Upon achieving their desired political aims, Conquest immediately declared victory by starting a new town called Victory, and later giving LHM something to wonder about when he sees the two places on the map.

However, the Cato-Conquest-Victory saga is not free of irony yet.  Cato Township could have been named after Cato the Elder, a Roman military commander and statesman.  If that were the fact, then Cato Township having birthed Conquest and Victory has no irony whatsoever.  However, it is more likely that the township of Cato was named after Cato the Younger, a Roman statesman and philosopher of the school of Stoicism.  As a Stoic, Cato the Younger would have held the belief that emotions can be destructive forces, especially if used to try to control inevitable universal forces, and that reason and ultimate happiness came from keeping oneself under self-control and evincing fortitude.  One cannot control what the universe and should not try, and if one is virtuous and in control, one is immune to misfortune.  The early Greek Stoics even eschewed politics because they believed in cosmopolitanism - that one is a citizen of the greater world and not just of one political entity.  Thus, the irony.  The town of Conquest was born out of political dispute with the township of Cato, complete with the investment of anger on both sides, and is an example of petty and small political concerns over brotherhood and equality that Cato the Younger would have emphasized.

That's an interesting little story, but here's the other point I want to make in this post.  Many place names in the United States are derived from ancient Greece and Rome, or from Europe.  This makes sense, as the U.S. is a nation of immigrants.  Therefore, the first English settlers on the East Coast gave their towns and states and regions names that evoked their homeland, such as Dover (Delaware), Cambridge (Massachusetts), Camden (New Jersey), New York City, and Plymouth (North Carolina).

Of course, other ethnic groups that made up this country named areas that evoked their own homes.  We have many place names in the Southwestern U.S., for instance, that are Spanish.  Germans added places in the U.S., often multiple times, as Berlin, Potsdam, Hamburg and Hanover.  Names that evoke Italy include Milan (multiple states), as well as Rome (multiple states), Naples (Florida), Venice (multiple states), and Florence (multiple states).

New York was New Amsterdam in its early years as a Dutch settlement on Manhattan.  In the middle of Texas, you can find Czech town names.  French place names are found all over the United States, given that much of the middle part of the country was explored by French explorers and trappers.

It all makes me wonder, given that the United States is in a period where it is the preeminent power in the world, if that a thousand years from now the names of our great personages will dot the globe.  Will we see a village, town or city of "Gates" spring up in China, or a "Jobs," India?  Will someone name a town after Jefferson in Africa (the capital city of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after President James Monroe)?  Will the U.S. even have people, academicians or politicians or celebrities or captains of industry, who are deemed important enough to name places after in other parts of the world?

Let's take our query a little further.  Will the U.S. have enough impact on the world that someday we will see a New Chicago spring up in another country?  Will a Houston or Dallas appear in some other region of the world to one day rival the memory of their American forebears, just as New York dwarfs Old York, and Boston, Massachussetts is more well known than its English namesake.  Does the United States have anything to offer the world so that even one day, when our empire crumbles as it will, as it must, some place names will evoke the country that pioneered a working, large scale democracy for the world?  Or will something happen that causes American emigration - a huge diaspora to other regions of the world - so that those peoples, in foreign lands, remember their lost homeland by naming their settlements and towns after the places they left?

We see the remnants and memories of some past great civilizations every day in the names that we have chosen to give to places in the U.S.  When our time is past, will we be worthy of such remembrance, or will we fade into obscurity like other civilizations whose memories are locked in museums and books.  It's interesting to think about and speculate.

Musical Interlude

I'm not sure why I thought of this song, I Don't Wanna by the Asylum Street Spankers, except that it has a lot of place names in it.  It's a catchy tune, though.

How many of the place names in the song do you know or have you been to?  See bottom of page.*

If you want to know more about Conquest and Cato

An 1879 History of Conquest
Town of Conquest
Village of Cato
Wikipedia: Town of Cato
Wikipedia: Village of Cato
Wikipedia: Conquest

Next up: Somewhere on the north side of Oneida Lake

*Place names in song:  Scotland, Wales, England, France, Moscow, Malta, Spain, Cuba, Brooklyn, Paris, Rome, Teapot Dome, Orleans, Cairo, Broadway, 21, India, Georgia, Pismo Beach, Smithfield, China, your house.

Friday
Jan132012

Blue Highways: Culbertson and Plentywood, Montana

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is about to exit Montana via Plentywood, and we're riding along with him wondering about the irony of a town named Plentywood with no trees.  Before we get into North Dakota, I'll stop for a minute to examine irony in relation to place.  Ironically, it will be fun.  I promise.  To see where Plentywood is located, and maybe find some other ironically named places, here's your passage to the map.

Book Quote

"US 2 followed the Missouri River for miles.  At the High-line town of Culbertson I turned north toward treeless Plentywood, Montana, then went east again down forsaken blue highway 5, a road virtually on the forty-ninth parallel, which is the Canadian border in North Dakota."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 7


Downtown Culbertson, Montana. Photo by Colin Holloway and seen at City-Data. Click on photo to go to host site.

Culbertson and Plentywood, Montana

The quote today from Blue Highways got me thinking about the concept of irony.  What is irony, you may ask, as opposed to humor or sarcasm.  Let's check the definition.  According to Merriam-Webster Online, irony is:

1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony

2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c: an ironic expression or utterance

3 a (1): incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2): an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

Definitions 1 and 3 don't really fit into what I'm going to discuss in this post, except for maybe the idea of incongruity.  Definition 2 though really fits, especially when one examines place names which seem out of character with the actual physical reality of the place.

Some place names are simply named in honor of someone.  Culbertson, for example, was named in honor of Major Alexander Culburtson, who headed Fort Union in Montana for the American Fur Company.  Other place names are indicative of settlers' desires - their hope for beauty, tranquility, solace, etc.  Sometimes place names come from natural features of the area.

However, some place names, either by design or by accident, are truly ironic.  Plentywood is a prime example, and LHM points it out in the book by calling it "treeless Plentywood."  According to Plentywood's Wikipedia entry, the name was meant to be ironic.  It was established when, on this treeless plain of Montana, a chuck wagon cook was unsuccessfully trying to build a fire out of wet buffalo dung, to the frustration of the hungry cowboys.  One finally one told him to go 2 miles up the creek where he'd find plenty wood.

The ironic nature of the name got me thinking about whether there were other ironic names for towns and cities, and I decided to do a little Googling.  I found two things.  Yes, there are ironic names for places in America, and there are many people who don't understand the concept of irony.

For example, this website asked people to contribute ironic names for places.  One ironic place mentioned was Nowhere, Oklahoma (which is really somewhere, obviously).  How interesting to find out, truthfully, that Sutherland is the second northernmost county in Great Britain.  Or that Great Britain has other interesting and ironic place names, such as No Place, or perhaps Pity Me, which to me would be ironic unless the townspeople are really miserable.  I keep seeing references to Who'd A Thought It, Alabama, though I can't find it in Google Earth or on Wikipedia, which would make for a double irony.  It would be ironic if it existed because obviously, somebody thought it, but if it didn't exist even though there's numerous references to it, then there's obvious irony because nobody a thought it!  There is evidently an area in Cape May, New Jersey that is known ironically as Poverty Beach because it now sits near mansions for the well-heeled.

However, this same site also showed that people don't quite understand irony.  Some wrote about place names that were simply funny or strange.  Like Why, Arizona - though you could make the argument that somebody thought "because" and established the town.  Somebody very pruriently suggested Beaver Slide, Montana, because, they added with great color and imagery, it was filled with unsavory people who "couldn't get laid in a monkey whore house with a bagful of bananas."  However, that irony is based on assumption, not fact.  Ironically, Beaver Slide doesn't seem to exist, though I'm sure people would manage to have sex in Beaver Slide - just very ironic sex.  Others named places I couldn't find.  One just had to add Fucking, Austria (pronounced foo-king) because...well, obviously.  But just because a town in Austria is named Fucking doesn't make it ironic, though I would suppose it would be if the town was full of celibates.

There was a nice column by a guy who went to a place in Virginia called Dulles Town Center, only to find there was no town to have a center in - simply a shopping center and subdivision.  He used the column to look a little more in depth about how places are named, and discovered that subdivisions and developments are often named ironically.  I started thinking about it, and my wife's parents live in one such development called The Meadows in Sarasota, Florida.  It was built by an English development company that basically cleared a bunch of wetlands, put in grass, houses and condos, and a golf course, and gave everything English-style names.  For example, her parents live in the section called Heronmere.  What was swamp ironically became The Meadows.  With alligators.

So, when you drive past subdivisions with names like Quail Hills, you might wonder if there really are quail.  Or if you in the vicinity of a place called Paradise Park, is there really a park?  Names like Valley Heights are kind of ironic in that they don't make any sense.  If you want to have some fun, make your own subdivision name here.  Or, for even more fun, you can generate positive or negative subdivision names at this site.

Do you ever notice that when something's right in front of your nose, you often don't see it.  It was almost like a smack upside my head, after I started writing this post, when I realized that I grew up in an ironically named place!  Fort Bragg, California sounds like a military establishment.  It is not.  There is a true military base called Fort Bragg in North Carolina.  But Fort Bragg, California has no fort.  The original fort for which the town got its name existed for about 10 years from 1857 to 1867 to maintain control on the now long disbanded Mendocino Indian Reservation.  Over the years, the town has been mistaken for the military base.  I don't know how many times I've had to disabuse people of the notion that their father/brother/uncle had served there.  A teacher of mine drew a popular cartoon put on local t-shirts with a tourist on it wondering "Where's the Fort?"  I even heard a story about a draftee in World War II from San Francisco who was elated when he found out he was being sent to Fort Bragg because it was close to home and he would get to see his family.  He took the bus up, got off, looked around, and became more and more confused until finally somebody asked what was wrong.  He was gently told that he was supposed to go to North Carolina because there was no fort in Fort Bragg.  I believe the story related that he was given leniency for the mix-up.

So, in this post about ironically named places, I almost forgot all about the town where I grew up.  Now isn't that ironic?

Musical Interlude

Alanis Morrissette explains irony beautifully in her song Ironic.  "It's like rain on your wedding day.  It's a free ride when you've already paid.  It's like good advice you just didn't take.  Who would have thought?  It figures."

If you want to know more about Culbertson and Plentywood

Culbertson, Montana
Culbertson Searchlight (newspaper)
Sheridan County, Montana
Wikipedia: Culbertson
Wikipedia: Plentywood

Next up: A radar station in western North Dakota