What’s in a name?
So many places within the four-county area got their names as a way to honor prominent families of the day; landowners who donated land for the railroad to come through back in the late 1880s, for example, resulted in town names like Stovall, Townsville and Stem.
An area hit the “big time” when it got a post office, and local historian and Thornton Library’s North Carolina Room specialist Mark Pace said the names that postmasters chose resulted in names like Dabney, Epsom and others. Pace and WIZS’s Bill Harris combed through a list of townships and communities – some still in existence and others lost to time and progress – during Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment of The Local Skinny!
Take Dabney, for instance. When a post office was established there, the postmaster renamed the community of Herndon (president of the railroad)to Dabney to honor William Dabney, a state geologist who “found some pretty neat things” in the 1880s and 1890s. Dabney later moved to Texas and became a prominent professor and university president.
And the community known as Mobile, for example, never had its own post office, but got its name because of the ties to Mobile, Alabama that the Hawkins family, a prominent African American family in Henderson, had.
More recently, the Granville County town of Butner gets its name from Camp Butner, an Army base constructed in 1942. Maj. Gen. Henry W. Butner, from Stokes County, NC, had died just a few years earlier and officials thought it fitting to name the base for someone from North Carolina, Pace said. Butner served in World War I and was noted for developing artillery for the Army, he added.
“It was run by the state of North Carolina until it was incorporated in 2007,” Pace said, making it the third newest town in the state.
The Umstead brothers – John and William B. – used their political influence to get the government to building the base in Granville County, where land was cheap and the camp could be relatively secluded but in close proximity to a large city (Durham).
The origin of Butner’s next-door neighbor, Creedmoor, isn’t quite so clear. There are several theories out there, Pace said, but he suspects that the town got its name from a famous gun range on Long Island, NY called Creedmoor Gun Range. There were a lot of gun enthusiasts in the area when Creedmoor was incorporated in 1911, he added.
The Lyons family established a post office in 1886 and there’s a Lyon Station Road located nearby.
William Thomas Stem was a big farmer in Granville County and he gave land for the railroad to come through. The name Stem replaced an earlier community called Tally Ho, which was a stagecoach stop. Tally Ho Road and Tally Ho township serve as reminders today.
There is a similar situation up in the northern part of Granville County, in the Sassafras Fork township. That name, Pace said, goes back to the late 1700s, but the town name was changed to Stovall to honor John W. Stovall who donated the land for, you guessed it, the railroad to come through to connect Clarksville and Oxford.
Communities like Gela near Stovall, Zacho near Wilton and Woodsworth near Townsville are just a few examples of communities that just sort of died off, Pace said. In the case of Woodsworth, Pace said, the family for which the community is named, moved to Arkansas but the name stuck. Zacho had a post office, and was located south of Wilton going toward the Tar River. Until just a few years ago, there had been a one-room shed that served as a post office.
There may have been only one Zacho, but several counties claim communities called Sandy Creek, Pace said.
There’s one in Vance, one in Warren and one in Franklin, he said. And they’re located near each other geographically, which could muddy the waters for genealogy researchers who are trying to find where ancestors lived or where they may be buried.
The oldest place name with European origin is Nutbush creek. William byrd doing dividing line between nc and va. Surveying in 1722.
Came to a creek in northern vance co. had a lot of hazel nut. So they just called it Nutbush creek.
“The oldest place name with a European origin,” Pace said, “is Nutbush Creek,” located in the general area of Williamsborough north of Henderson. William Byrd was surveying the area that created the North Carolina-Virginia state line in 1722.
“He came to a creek in northern Vance County that had a lot of hazel nut trees,” Pace explained. “So they just called it Nutbush Creek.”
Sometimes names come about as a matter of practicality.
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