Defiance County’s Hicksville is a long way from the setting for Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” but its name appears in the American classic in Chapter 33.
John Grindrod/The Lima News
While it’s been many years since my earliest school days at St. Charles, I do remember quite a bit of both the earnest efforts of the Good Sisters of Charity to try to educate my mischievous mates and me but also to try to ensure the roads we walked were mostly the high ones. However, boys being boys, we tried to find humor in our lessons. And, I remember how we bit our cheeks when, during geography, we first heard of that lake in South America that is its continent’s largest. We couldn’t wait to get to recess so we could share our communal laugh out loud.
The fact is I’ve always had an ear for places with unusual names. Now, if you ask any of the residents of Hicksville in our Buckeye patch of terra firma whether their name for their town is particularly odd, I think they’d say no.
However, were he around today, American literary humorist Mark Twain might disagree. After all, using an age-old pejorative term for someone who’s short on sophistication might seem a tad quirky. The reason I mentioned Twain’s finding the town’s name as possibly amusing is he actually included it in the book that the great Hemingway once said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
Since it’s probably been quite some time since most of you read the book that I taught for many years, I’ll tell you how Twain worked the name into a story that’s geographically set along the Mississippi River from Missouri to points south, which is far away from Ohio’s Defiance County.
In Chapter 33, Tom Sawyer is reintroduced into the plot line when, as a practical joke, upon his arrival to a farm in Arkansas, he initially tells his Aunt Sally, who’s expecting a visit from him but hasn’t seen him in enough years that he doesn’t know what he looks like, that he’s a stranger from Hicksville who just happened upon her house while passing through.
Of course, as you may have guessed, when it comes to Hicksville, like a lot of smaller towns, the name of the town of around 3,500 folks, is actually eponymous in nature. Like Ephraim Crider’s name being used in Cridersville, Hicksville, is named after Henry Hicks, who owned a land-acquisition company and who platted the community in 1835 and ’36.
After thinking about the small slice of literary fame Twain bestowed upon Hicksville, I got to thinking about other towns with unusual names. Recently at a Lulu’s breakfast with pals Jim O’Neill and former Major league Baseball scout Jim Martz, O’Neill and I both laughed at a scouting story Martz relayed, one that found him in Horse Cave, Kentucky, sizing up twin-brother infielders Blake and Brian Doyle.
Speaking of baseball, I do know there have been quirky names of towns that wound up as monikers for Major League Baseball players, such as Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, the pitcher who started his baseball trek in Vinegar Bend, Alabama. And, let me not forget former Red Sox Oriole, White Sox and Tiger Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell, whose nickname is an homage to his hometown of Paw Paw, Michigan.
As for other quirky town names, well, you might add to the list such places as Bangs, Uncertain and Cut and Shoot, all in Texas; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Whynot and Kill Devil Hills, both in North Carolina; Okay, Oklahoma; and Last Chance, Iowa.
As for some thoughts on a couple of those places, well, I have to wonder if someone like me with such follicle deficiencies would ever feel comfortable in Bangs, Texas. Remembering the game show “Truth or Consequences,” I had to believe there was some connection to the name of that New Mexico city. After a little Google searching, I was intrigued to know that the original name of the town was Hot Springs.
In 1950, when the host of the popular radio game show of the same name, Ralph Edwards, issued a proclamation that he would broadcast the 10th-anniversary show from the first town that would rename itself after the show, the folks of Hot Springs took him up on that in 1950. The original name was certainly appropriate, given the presence of several geothermal springs, much like Hot Springs, Arkansas, one of Jane and my vacation stops last year.
While the above names of towns might seem a bit odd to those who don’t live there, to their towns’ citizens they just signify a pretty comfortable place, one they call “home,” in much the same way as those who hail from anywhere else, like Lima.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
