Yesterday’s post had Tricia wondering if the Potter swimming hole might have been named after the family surname of Potter. I’m not sure, but it seems likely a family by the name of Potter lived nearby or it might have been a person who was a potter by profession.
Don Casada shared the same thought in a comment.
I wonder if the Potter moniker for the hole was for a person by that name or someone of that profession?
There’s a swimming hole on Deep Creek that was a favorite with locals in my youth. I say “was” because we’ve lost this bit of our free heritage to the county-run, taxpayer-funded pool. It wasn’t the biggest hole, by any stretch of the imagination; there was a longer and deeper one just around the bend above it. But it has a good-sized boulder along its edge which made for a diving or cannonball launching pad.
There’s a photo of it (taken in October when the water is quite low) with a note about it here:
https://www.mymountainfolks.com/Photos/Big_Rock.pdf
If you jump over to the link you can see Big Rock swimming hole and read what Don wrote about it. You can even see the big rock it was named for.
I love how places take on the names of people, happenings, and landscape features. Sometimes those names fade away while other times they hang on till the people, happenings, and landscape features are long since gone.
Pap always talked about a place up the creek being the ole burnt down place. The house that was there at one time was lived in by his family, but it burnt down before he was born.
There’s another place called the pear trees. Pap can remember a few pear trees being there when he was a boy, but in my lifetime there’s never been any pear trees there. Yet the name remains.
Katie and Corie dubbed a place in the creek just above our house butt crack falls when they were little. We all call it that now.
Last night’s video: Green Beans in Appalachia – Picking, Breaking, Eating, Putting Up.
Tipper
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Point Peter was the name of a Post Office many years ago in Georgia. Originally it was Peter’s Pint until someone in Washington got curious and found why the community had that name. The story was that you could put your money in a hole in a tree and return in an hour and pick up a pint of moonshine. I’ve seen many places throughout this country like other commenters have listed. My daughter and I explored many abandoned silver and gold mines in the West. She always thought we would find some gold or silver that had been overlooked. We never did.
I’m proud to say I was born and raised in the Choestoe district of North Georgia known as “the land of the dancing rabbits.” Choestoe got its name from the Cherokee Indians who lived there before they were forced to leave after the discovery of gold. The little community I grew up in was called “Stink Creek.” As a child, I was always a little embarrassed to tell anyone I was from Stink Creek. I couldn’t understand how such a beautiful place could get such a terrible name. Many stories have surfaced about its origin, but no one knows for sure. All I know for sure is it holds such wonderful memories for me as a child. It’s the clearest, coldest, most beautiful little stream, and I spent many happy days wading in its water, eating grapes from the grapevines that grew along the creek, and especially the many happy summer afternoons sitting on the bank beside my grandfather while he fished. We’d always go home with a nice string of trout and my grandmother would cook them up for us for supper. It doesn’t get any better than that! 🙂
As usual, Tipper, you have presented your fans with another fascinating story! I always look forward to reading your articles and learning something about Appalachia. What a treasure it was for my sister to find you and turn me on to you! Highlight of my day, sometimes! God bless you, your family, and all your fans!
I just came back from running errands this morning, one to my bank. I know the tellers and they all know me, one is a next door neighbor. I don’t know how they heard about this place, but they were laughing and talking about it. My neighbor asked me if I had heard of it. It was Sugar Tit, SC. I have not only known of it all of my life but also know the exact location. It is in the Greer, Duncan, Roebuck area of SC. I do not know how it got that name but only know at one in the past a lot of farming was done in the area, later on it was numerous peach orchards, not it is nothing but housing developments and subdivisions.
A sugar tit is a pacifier. Before the modern rubber ones mothers would twist a rag, soak it in sugar water and let the baby suck on it. I’ve seen it done.
How a place in South Carolina would be named after it I wouldn’t hazard a guess.
Naming places after those who lived there was common where I grew up as well and even today many of those names remain, going back a couple of generations.
Morning Miss Tipper and everyone. Loving these memories. When I was a very young girl my paternal grandfather took us to a big water hole we knew as the Blue Hole. If I recall the water looked a deep, deep blue. Not surprisingly, it happens to be where I learned to swim. I wasn’t a great or probably even good swimmer, but it was so much fun and cooled us off on those terrible hot summer days. Daddy always had big old rubbery looking inner tubes. We rode from grandpa’s and grandma’s house in his old model T (?)
Later as a teenager and lots of changes in the area that old water hole was called the Green Hole, we were still able to cool off in it on a hot summer days. What a pleasant memory for me. So many other places pop up in my mind Big Creek, Charrette Creek, Babbler State Park, many family picnics, swims and down right fun. My uncle had a swimming pond on his farm, we shared that one with the cows. We weren’t too smart about that. Also swam off sandbars in the Missouri River, near my maternal grandparents. I’m now blessed with my own swimming pool and love taking dips whenever I can. I’m 78 now and all these beautiful memories bring tears to my eyes, not for pain, but for all my family who no longer are here. I’m so grateful for them all. Everyone have a blessed and wonderful happy weekend. Summer is fading fast. Enjoy as much as you can and thank God for all these things we have or had in our life. J.
I love old place names! The stories I can imagine can fill any idle time with people and places of long ago.
We have lived in our current home for five years, but to tell someone where I live I still have to call it J.N.’s place from the previous farmer who lived here. Locals will probably always think of it as such. But to me and mine it is simply home.
It was not too long ago, before cell phones and GPS, when folks had to stop at houses and gas stations to ask for directions. Most of the time, the directions included a turn at a place known to locals and very confusing to the lost out-of-towner. Many of the communities and hollers in my hometown are named after families who live there. There’s a street about five miles down the road named Happy Holler. I have several friends who live there, and they simply call it the holler, and we all know where they are talking about. I heard that the Jim Beam family named the area years ago when they began operating their bottling plant at the entrance and built their family home behind it.
When I was in school, we had a lesson on family names. Apparently, people’s names were connected to what they did for a living a long time ago. For instance, Mr. Farmer was just that, a farmer. Mr. Smith, a blacksmith ….ect. I use to have fun trying to match family names to what might have been their ancient ancestors profession. Places are often the same. There is a road around here called Hogbranch road…yes there were hog pens along the road at one time.
I’m very familiar with old home places being called by the family name or even something like you turn where the “old barn that burned down used to be:” When down south I would say I was going to stop at the Molly Harmon Spring to get me a dipper of the best cold water. Everyone from the rural community would have know exactly where that spring was located. We still refer to our Grandparents place as I’m going out to the “old place.”
Your video on breaking beans brought back many happy memories of me sitting with my Grandmother, Mother and Aunts breaking beans. That is what we called it too, plus we also put shelly beans in the pan too:) That was about 60 years ago but the memories are clear and happy ones.
the place in the creek where we played when I was a kid we called ‘the rock crossing’ because it was the shallowest part of the creek with lots of flat rock so was easy to get to the other side. the little kids would wade and play there and the bigger (older) kids played adjacent to it because from the rock crossing the water flowed over big, angled, flat rocks that created a water fall that dumped into a big pool and we could run and jump (belly flop) onto the wet rocks and slide into the water–was super fun–and we could swing out on grapevines and drop down into the deeper hole. no one plays in the creek now (a relative put in a large in ground swimming pool at their house years ago so all the younger generations prefer the pool over trekking through the pasture to get to the creek (they do not realize the greater amount of fun and memories is going to be at the creek) Hope VBS produced some new souls for Christ this week (cookies and koolaid and cool crafts are my memories of VBS when I was little–I loved it)
There’s a place in the Catawba not too far from me that’s known as the Tater Hole. It has been gussied up and renamed Lakeside Park officially but to all the locals it is still the Tater Hole. Before it became a public park it was a popular fishing hole and the “taters” were the catfish that came out of there.
I’d like to see a picture of butt crack falls, please.
Three swimming holes in my area come to mind. One is called the Blue Hole and another is called the Devil’s Backbone. The third one is the Baptizing Hole. In my youth, I swam in the Devil’s Backbone many times.
I have a lot of interest for place names, in particular the ones that show up on old maps. There is a lot of information that can be gleaned from them. Just as one example, there are several roads in east TN named “Old Stage Road”. They are just that, the former route of a stage line back before the Civil War. And with a little digging you can discover that these stage lines were part of the interstate highway system of their day, reaching Washington or Philadelphia for example. Topographic maps are sprinkled with community place names which often originated as a post office name (long since gone). Those names were mostly locally-sourced but had to be unique – determined by the Post Office – with no duplicates. Because initially duplicates would be proposed, people had to get creative and some unusual names resulted. Those maps also record natural events or conditions; e.g. ” firescald”, “hurricane”, “Pilot Knob” and “Slick Shoals”. I have posted about this before, but in mountain and hill country coves and hollers often have the name of the family that first settled it or were otherwise prominent; ” Coffey Holler”, “Jones Holler”, “McLemore Cove”, ” Sherrill Cove”, etc. Citizens can submit nominations for naming but they must include documentation for why that name. Something like that would be a really good Boy Scout project.
My family on both sides are from eastern Ky. If you go there, you will see landmarks, roads, hollers, etc with the name “Potter.” (Potter’s Holler, eg.) I wasn’t raised there but my family visited once or twice a year, and you heard the people, and my parents refer to these places. I remember when I moved to Virginia, Charlottesville, asking where the library was located. I was told “go up Vinegar Hill and you’ll find it.” There was no Vinegar Hill Road, but the natives were identifying it by a vinegar business that had been there many years ago. They couldn’t even tell me the name of the road. People used landmarks when referring you to locations.
Swimming holes are one thing I was raised to be quite leery of since my uncle Robert drowned at the age of 12 in Wolfe Creek and was sucked into a natural whirlpool which is a high risk in WV and VA. Once a girl pushed me into a cold creek I wasn’t expecting and the shock of the cold caused me to almost drown while they all laughed at me. It was that day I realized people will kill you and laugh about it. The other day a guy with a little cigarette and in his 40’s almost blew up a gas station and certainly set it ablaze and drove off. He’s in BIG trouble, but yeah idiots do not care the least about others. I used to swim and dive into the Chesapeake Bay and was fearless even into storms in the bay at about 12. At almost 60, my fears are pages deep. Now I’m not going out there if I don’t have to. I’m into swimming and hot tubs and I will wade up to my nether regions in a creek or hole, but that’s it… yall have fun in “butt crack falls” and I hope a snapping turtle don’t snap off a much needed appendage…lol a favorite saying of mine is it’s all good til it ain’t…
That sort of thing happens in urban areas too. The town where I grew up there’s a street with a group of these cute little houses that look like they belong in a fairytale. Now you just mention the storybook houses and long time residents know exactly where you’re talking about.
That is interesting how or why places are named. I think about swimming places I use to swim at when I was a child and now I’m wondering how they got their names. I’ll have to look them up.
It’s interesting to see modern day roads with names that hint at the area’s past. Those that mention mill, mine, church, cave, toll, station, cemetery and the like can be helpful in research. Exploring these byways can be like a treasure hunt. The prize is finding the old mill or cemetery or the remains of what used to be. I always get a thrill from the exploration, discovery and surmising what must have been. Brings a bit of sadness, too, when there is only a portion of a structure or land feature remaining.
Love the little farmhouse in the photo. I hope to have a porch like that someday.
I have lived all of my life right where I am now living. I know of several places around the area that are known by family names to us ‘natives.” One very close to me is the West Place, although not a family name, another place is called The Tom Cat House. No, it is not what you think, the owners always had a yard full of cats, at least that is what I have always been told. The homes and families on both of these places are long gone but are still known by these names. Even today us natives will use a family name of a home to tell each other where something may have happened, such as a tree fell on the power line near so and so”s home. We will know exactly where it happened.