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The 2010 Geographic Names Conference
of the
Council of Geographic Names Authorities
in the United States
Was hosted by the
Missouri Board on Geographic Names
Jane Messenger & Chris Barnett, conference co-chair
October 5--9
At the
University Plaza Hotel & Convention Center
Springfield, MO
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Atrium at the University Plaza
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Restaurant
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Room at University Plaza
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CONFERENCE THEME
SINKS, BALDS, AND
HOLLOWS
The extensive planning by the
MOBGN was evident with a well run conference. Early in the process the Executive
Secretary was consulted and invited to be a major player in the planning; he
took part in three on-site planning sessions and numerous e-mail and phone
calls. Every session ran smoothly and on time. This is an important matter. The
addition of the NHD workshop was well worth the effort by providing insight for
both the NHD stewards and Geographic Names folks. The Keynote speaker was a
delight. The academic papers were balanced and well presented. It was a bonus to
have a graduate student come in to present his research. Andre and Chris
provided a wonderful Banquet presentation. All in all the conference was a
success both on content and financially. Most presentations have been or will be
placed on the COGNA web site.
2010 Final Report
Note: Power Point Presentations have been added for
viewing. Click on the underlined title or presenter to view.
Program
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Day/Time |
Program Item |
Person |
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TUESDAY |
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10:00 – 5:00 |
Registration |
Wayne Furr, Helen Vineyard, & Anne Payne |
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2:00 –5:00 |
MOBGN meeting – Harolston vs. Nardeton Creek and other variants plus the 30+ proposed new St. Louis stream
names.
The break included
sampling of items in the MOBGN cookbook
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MOBGN |
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6:00 –
9:00 |
Reception – with welcomes by
Dana Maugans, Springfield Convention Visitor Bureau and Dan Chiles, Springfield Mayor Pro Tem |
Jerry Vineyard to
introduce Dan Chiles |
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WEDNESDAY |
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7:30 – |
Registration |
MOBGN staff |
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8:30 – 8:45 |
Opening housekeeping remarks |
Chris Barnett |
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8:45 – 9:00 |
Opening remarks |
Wayne Furr |
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9:00
– 10:00
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Keynote Speaker |
Edd Akers,
Representative
from
Silver Dollar City |
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10:00 – 10:30 |
Break |
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10:30 – Noon |
State-Federal
Roundtable
The State/Federal Roundtable session should be considered the most important session of the
conference. Topics are often linked to the Principles, Policies, and Procedures
but consideration should be much broader with subjects for GNIS and other
matters of applied toponymy that delegates and attendees would deem of interest
or useful.
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Chris Barnett,
moderator |
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Noon – 1:30 |
Lunch on your own |
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1:30 – 3:00 |
NHD/GNIS (National
Hydrography Dataset) Steward presentations
Katy Hattenhauer, Arkansas:
Impact of GNIS on NHD
Craig Coutros, New Jersey:
NHD / GNIS Stewardship in New Jersey
Bruce Fisher, Oregon: Oregon NHD - GNIS Project
Paul Kimsey, USGS-NHD: Names
in NHD: GazVector Integrated Database
Karen Hanson, USGS-WBD:
Integration of the Watershed Boundary Dataset (WBD) Hydrologic Unit Names
and Codes within the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) |
Bill Sneed. moderator |
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3:00 – 3:30 |
Break |
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3:30 – 5:00 |
NHD/GNIS panel
discussion, Q&A session
Katy Hattenhauer, Arkansas
Craig Coutros, New Jersey
Bruce Fisher, Oregon
Paul Kimsey, USGS-NHD
Karen Hanson, USGS-WBD
Maria McCormick. USGS-NHD
Lou Yost, US-BGN
Jenny Runyon, US-BGN |
Bill Sneed, moderator
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7:00 – 8:30 |
COGNA Business meeting Click
on the underlined link for a PDF of the minutes. |
Wayne Furr presiding
All COGNA voting
member |
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THURSDAY |
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8:30 – 10:00 |
State Reports To see the 2010
State Reports click on the link. |
Wayne Furr |
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10:00 – 10:30 |
Break |
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10:00 – Noon |
DNC staff reports |
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Noon – 1:30 |
Lunch at The Tower
Club
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Top of Hammons Tower
View The Tower Club |
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1:30 – 3:00 |
DNC meeting
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3:00 – 3:30 |
Break |
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3:30 – 4:30 |
DNC meeting continued
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FRIDAY |
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8:30 – 9:00
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Overview of Montana’s
Geographic Names Web Page |
Gerry Daumiller |
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9:00
– 9:30 |
Mark Twain and Missouri Place Names
An
examination of Mark Twain's travels through Missouri, his use of real place
names in his literature, real places renamed with fictional names, fictional
places Mark Twain located in Missouri, and Missouri towns Twain moved to
other states in his writings. |
Henry Sweets |
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9:30
– 10:00 |
Stream
Metrics, Generic Place Names, and Geography
Geographers in the 1950s launched ambitious studies of
toponymic generics in the United States. Wilbur Zelinsky surveyed
distributions of selected generic place names over most of the Northeastern
US. Meredith Burrill examined toponymic generics for physical features
across the US. Robert West studied the term bayou in time and space, while
E. Joan Wilson Miller looked at generics in folk naming of the Arkansas
Ozarks. Work inevitably involved tedious manual recording of place name
information. With completion of 1:24,000 mapping, advent of the Geographic
Names Information System (GNIS) and the coming of age of GIS technologies,
abilities to explore specifics and generics of place names have been
substantially extended and enhanced. Questions posed by previous studies can
be answered more fully, while other questions posed.
This paper explores the interrelationship of stream
metrics, generic place names, and geography. Streams are the most named
feature in the US, but are all streams named, if not how many and where? Are
place name generics merely historic artifacts or do they now as they may
have in the past serve a function? What do generics tell us about the
physical qualities of streams, naming culture, and geographic location?
Metrics of stream length, flow characteristics and position in the stream
hierarchy are examined. Naming patterns and diversity in naming are analyzed
and mapped. Base data are GNIS and National Hydrology Dataset (NHD)
information. The former were assembled into US datasets of stream names and
latter, data for watersheds in a variety of landform regions.Keywords:
place-names, streams, GIS, culture |
Janet
H. Gritzner, Department of Geography, South Dakota State University,
Brookings, SD 57007 |
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10:00 – 10:30 |
Break |
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10:30 –11:00 |
Proposal for a Thesis: A Case Study in Toponymy: The Place Names of the
Tewa Basin of Northern New Mexico"
This presentation concerns a proposal for a
thesis whose purpose is to compare and contrast place names of a geographic
area that are in three languages. Its setting is north-central New Mexico in
a geographical region defined as the "Tewa Basin". The Tewa are a cultural
group of American Indians categorized as the Pueblo. The three primary
languages that appear in this region today are Tewa, the New Mexico Spanish
dialect, and American English.
The project is
evolving to catalog names for topographical features using a collection
acquired from personal knowledge; informant interviews, documented sources,
and names provided by the database of the US Bureau on Geographic Names. The
project will sort the names into three socio-linguistic categories and
associate any documentation or oral tradition with them. A tentative
hypothesis is presented that the Tewa and Hispanic New Mexican societies
satisfied their consumptive needs with local resources and developed
cultures reflecting a dependence upon, stewardship of, and influence by
their environment. The priorities that these cultures hold to may have been
tagged to geographic features with their respective naming schemes. The
American English place names in the Tewa Basin may be expected to contrast
sharply with the former two, reflecting a low dependence on local spaces,
transitory place attachment, and employ the most schemes to manage land
remotely (such as the Public Lands Survey System).
Google Earth mapping
service software is being employed to "place" the names, assist in the
sorting process, and view geographic patterns. The project has among its
objectives to rescue names overlooked in the National Map, correct names
with errors, and submit "new" names into the database of the Geographic
Names Information System.
Keywords: toponymy,
geographic names, new mexico, human environment interaction, place names,
cultural landscape, cultural heritage, cultural worldview
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Roberto Valdez,
Geography Grad Student* -University of New Mexico |
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11:00
– 11:30 |
Ozark/Ozarks: Evolution of a Vernacular Name
The regional term, Ozark(s), began in the eighteenth century with
multiple meanings. More than two centuries later, the term has evolved from
references to a specific place, people, and a river to an entire region. An
early geographic designation encompassed a square mileage much larger than
modern geographic understandings.
Lynn Morrow will provide an overview of how this
adjective and noun has been used since its introduction into the colonial
Indian trade in the Arkansas Delta. Federal government explorers placed the
term on an American map in the 1820s that launched a generation-long
diffusion of the name before it became common in the 1850s as a descriptor
for the uplands.
After the Civil War, Missouri geologists and
geographers applied the term to their professional work. Journalists picked
up the term and it gained significant currency in Missouri’s mineral
histories. Victorian tourists helped make the term public as travelers
sought recreation at karst areas in the Ozarks. By the 1920s, Missouri
scholars Curtis Marbut and Carl Sauer had placed the term irrevocably in the
professional and public domain. Since then its use has exploded in
promotional work, especially the tourist industry. |
Lynn Morrow |
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11:30
– Noon |
Toponymic Studies in the U.S. as Seen in the Journal Names
COGNA and the American Name Society (ANS) have been closely allied for
years, and many regular COGNA attendees have been officers in ANS. The
founders of ANS in 1951 were mostly interested in studying place names,
although other naming interests were included, especially personal names and
names in literature. The official journal of ANS is called Names: A
Journal of Onomastics, and over the nearly sixty years of its existence
slightly more than 25 percent of its 1,119 articles have been devoted to the
study of U.S. place names, while the rest have focused on other kinds of
names or place names in other parts of the world. Some of the U.S. studies
have been of names of a particular area, such as a county or a state, and
others have been more general, such as studies of place name generics.
There have also been studies of naming patterns, of pronunciation, and of
name changes. The work of the Domestic Names Committee of the U.S. Board on
Geographic Names has received the attention of several articles, and in the
early days there was a regular bibliography of place-name studies in the
United States, but none has appeared since the early 1990s. In recent
times, the number of place name studies has declined for undetermined
reasons. What is needed is a new interest in both the theoretical and
practical study of the millions of names that exist in this country.
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Tom Gasque |
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Noon – 1:30 |
Lunch on your own |
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1:30 – 2:00
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The Genesis of a Place
Name: Jay, Maine; Are the Historians Wrong or is it Just a Big Coincidence?
In 1912 the Rev. Benjamin Lawrence wrote the history of Jay, Maine. He
stated that when Phipps Canada, Massachusetts, District of Maine
incorporated on February 26, 1795 it took the name Jay to honor John Jay.
Jay was the United States’ first Chief Supreme Court Justice who, in
November 1794, successfully negotiated the Treaty of London (also known as
the Jay Treaty). Two later historians, Helen Caldwell Cushman in the book
“Horizons Unlimited: A History of Jay” (1967) and Virginia Plaisted Moulton
in the book “A History of Jay, Maine from its
settlement as Phips Canada” (1995), repeat Rev. Lawrence’s interpretation.
Cartographers and surveyors tell a different story, however. In a map
produced around 1720 for the Pejepscot Proprietors (a land speculation
company), at the point in the Androscoggin River where its flow turns from
west-east to north-south in the present town of Jay, the point of land at
the bend is labeled Jay Point. Other contemporaneous documentation and oral
history indicates that this area obtained the name ‘Jay’ long before the
birth of John Jay.
This presentation will examine the evidence available which appears to
refute Rev. Lawrence’s assertion as to the origins of the name. It will
also make the argument that without an examination of the geographic
components, errors can and will be made in interpreting historical events.
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Michael Fournier
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2:00
– 2:30 |
Confluence and Crossroads: Historical Perspectives of
Missouri
Waiting on Abstract
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Frank Nickell |
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2:30
– 3:00 |
Can the Alternate Name Principle be Applied to Indigenous Toponymy?
The notion of Officially
Designated Alternate Name was developed by the Ontario Geographic Names
Board (OGNB) in the early 1990s in order to respond to the requirements of
the French Language Services Act. Field work revealed that in predominantly
French-speaking areas, official names were not being used. In their place,
either translations or substitutions were found to be in local usage, thus
creating a dual-naming situation that needed to be addressed. In accordance
with UNGEGN resolutions, an Alternate Name policy was devised to provide
official recognition to these French Names in specified contexts. A similar
issue is now developing with regard to Aboriginal toponymy. The OGNB is
exploring the possibility of applying the Alternate Name Policy to a set of
Ojibwe names in Pikangikum, a First Nation community in northwestern
Ontario. This paper explores the challenges involved and discusses
preliminary results of the project. |
André Lapierre |
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3:00 – 3:30 |
Break |
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3:30 – 4:00 |
Missouri Place Names
A look at the origin of many Missouri place names,
focusing on classical names, borrowed names, and contrived names.
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Henry Sweets |
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4:00 – 4:15 |
Touting
COGNA 2011 conference |
Renee Lewis |
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4:15 – 4:30 |
Wrap-up |
Chris Barnett & Wayne
Furr |
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6:00 – 9:00 |
Banquet
with
Presentation –
"French Names in Missouri and Missouri Pronunciation" |
André
Lapierre & Chris Barnett |
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SATURDAY |
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8:00 – 5:30 |
TOUR |
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Location |
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The tour has many
interesting places with interesting stories and several names issues that
will keep your interest. Below are a few of the stops but only a hint of
what to expect. |
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Oval
Sink – this is a sink that does become a spring at times |
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Wilson's Creek National Battlefield |
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Driving through Ozark to see the mill; discussing some of the names seen
along the route and their significance/history; discussing the geology and
formation names mentioning type localities; if traffic isn’t too bad and we
have time we'll go through downtown Branson via the Landing and see the old
bridge structure. |
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Murder Rock Golf Course Club House buffet luncheon. Beautiful view of the
top of the Ozarks. |
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Table
Rock overlook –While on the way talk about School of the Ozarks, Baird
Mountain and the Baird Mountain Limestone |
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Inspiration Tower where we get a 360o view of the Ozarks and can
see into Arkansas |
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Yocum
Pond mentioning some of the Shepherd of the Hills sites we see on the way. |
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Riverdale going through Reeds Spring, Reeds Spring Junction. |
For additional
information contact
Mr. T. Wayne Furr, Executive Secretary
Council of Geographic Names Authorities
3400 36th Avenue NE
Norman, Oklahoma 73026-7809
Telephone: 405-830-9848 mobile
405-364-7278
home
E-mail: twfurr@cogna50usa.org
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