If you're an inveterate map-reader, then you know place names reveal a lot. As the author George R. Steward says in his book Names of the Land, names offer clues on “how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune, and another joked, twisting an old name to make a new one.” The more than 3 million names on the map of the United States include several with Union connections. Some are well-known–the Seward of Alaska, for example. Others are surprises, such as Constable Hall in central New York. Here, we present a sampling, and we invite readers to send us other Union place names.
About 125 miles south of Anchorage is Seward, named in 1903 for one of the College's most illustrious alumni-William H. Seward, Class of 1820, the secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, and the man who negotiated the acquisition of Alaska from Russia.
The red-haired Seward came to Union in 1816 at the age of fifteen and enrolled in the sophomore class. His stay was interrupted by a financial misunderstanding with his father. Ashamed of his rustic appearance, young Seward had a Schenectady tailor make him clothing. His father refused to pay for what he thought was an unreasonable expense. So Seward withdrew from the College, traveled to Georgia with a friend, and became a schoolmaster for a short time. After a change of heart, he returned to Union and completed his studies with high honors, becoming one of the earliest members of the College's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1822.
Although inexperienced in international affairs when he was named secretary of state, Seward was no political novice, having served as a New York State senator, governor of the state, and a U.S. senator.
Seward negotiated for Alaska's sale in the face of heavy political opposition, which used “Seward's Folly” to describe the effort. He believed the territory's value would increase and that it would be a secure place for commercial and naval operations. The treaty to buy Alaska was signed in 1867. The cost of adding 590,000 square miles (about one-fifth the area of the continental United States) was $7.2 million. Later, when asked what his greatest political achievement was, Seward apparently told a friend, “The purchase of Alaska. But it will take another generation to find out.”
Today the town named for Seward has a population of 4,000. Located at the head of Resurrection Bay, it offers sport fishing, glacier and wildlife cruises, kayaking, summer dog sled races, and more. North of Nome is the Seward Peninsula, and across the nation in Auburn, N.Y., can be found the Seward House, a museum containing many articles associated with the former secretary's career.
Edward Tuckerman, Class of 1837, discovered the ravine that bears his name during one of his many field trips into the White Mountains of New Hampshire during the summer of 1842. Tuckerman Ravine, a favorite spring and summer skiing spot, is on the southeast shoulder of Mt. Washington. Known for its spectacular scenery and deep snow (fifty-five feet in the deepest spot), it is about 5,100 feet in elevation at the headwall's lip and drops about 800 feet.
As a youngster, Tuckerman studied various plants, animals, and minerals of Massachusetts. After Union, he graduated from Harvard Law School and spent a year traveling in Germany and Scandinavia, studying with botanist Elias Fries. In 1842, he returned to Union and earned his master's degree; in 1845, he returned to Harvard and completed his divinity degree. After his marriage, he settled in Amherst, Mass., where he taught botany at Amherst
College until his death in 1886. He devoted his life to the study of lichens, publishing about fifty botanical papers, and continued to revisit the White Mountains, contributing a chapter about its unusual vegetation to Starr King's renowned book, The White Walls. Tuckerman was known as the dean of American lichenologists, and the genus Tuckermania and several species have been named for him.
On the 100th anniversary of his graduation from Union, the College's Outing Club placed a bronze plaque in Tuckerman's honor near the little headwall at the junction of the Sherburne and Tuckerman Ravine trails. Attending the ceremony were representatives of Amherst, Harvard, and Dartmouth as well as botanists, conservationists, and members of Tuckerman's family.
During the height of
Colorado's gold rush in 1860, Edward Berthoud, of the Class of 1849, and his wife, Helen, settled in the town of Golden. Soon after arriving, Berthoud-a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in engineering-became associated with the Colorado Railroads. One of his first projects was to set out with a surveying party in 1861 to find the most direct route from Denver to Salt Lake City. The expedition led to the discovery of Berthoud Pass, a 11,314-foot pass located on the Continental Divide sixty-five miles west of Denver and now a popular ski resort area.
Berthoud served as secretary and chief engineer for the Colorado Central and Pacific Railroad for sixteen years. Considered one of Colorado's greatest pioneers, he is also one of its respected educators. In 1940, the Colorado School of Mines dedicated Berthoud Hall, a building for the study of geology and geophysics. Berthoud was a member of the territorial legislature that authorized the school's establishment and served as its first registrar. He headed the Departments of Civil Engineering and Geology and was also a member of the college's Board of Trustees.
In addition to Berthoud Pass and Berthoud Hall, the small town of Berthoud also honors Union's pioneer
and explorer.
Sheldon Jackson graduated from Union in 1855 and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1858. Shortly after his ordination, he began his extensive missionary career, which took him through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and much of the Rockies.
It is Alaska, however, that became his passion. From his arrival in 1877 until his death in 1909, he was committed to the spiritual, economic, and educational well-being of the people of the territory. He founded numerous schools and training centers that served native Alaskans, imported nearly 1,300 reindeer to bolster the livelihoods of Alaskan Eskimos, and worked toward the passage of the Organic Act of 1884, which ensured that Alaska would begin to set up a judicial system. (The next year, Jackson was appointed the first commissioner of education for Alaska.)
Worried that native cultures and their arts and ways of life would vanish, he traveled extensively and collected representative items. Today the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka houses many of Jackson's pieces, as well as other examples of Tlingit, Eskimo, and Aleut culture. It is the oldest museum in Alaska and was placed on the National Historical Register in 1972. The museum's collection has been called a jewel in the crown of Alaska ethnographic collections.
Jackson also played a major role in the beginning of what was to become Sheldon Jackson College, the oldest educational institution in continuous existence in the State of Alaska. Begun as the Sitka Industrial and Training School, it later became an elementary school, and in 1910 it was renamed Sheldon Jackson School. In 1917, a new boarding high school was added, and in 1944 the college program was organized. The college has grown into a four-year institution offering associate and bachelor degrees to students from widely diverse backgrounds.
In the mid-1970s, an Alaskan mountain was named for another alumnus who loved to study the land and headed West to explore it. Fritts Mountain, named in memory of Crawford E. “Jim” Fritts, of the Class of 1948, is located at the west end of the Angayucham Mountain Range.
A geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, Fritts spent two seasons mapping the Angayuchams. In 1972 he drowned while mapping along the Kogolutuk River in the Brooks Range, not far from the Arctic Circle.
At Union Fritts concentrated in the sciences, but showed a keen interest in geology. He earned his master's degree in geology from Michigan Tech and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He worked a number of years with the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver before heading for Alaska.
In addition to the two years that Fritts spent mapping the Angayuchams, he also explored the Brooks Range over four seasons. During that time he compiled and published a six-volume bibliography of geology that was welcomed by the mineral industry and those concerned with Alaska's geology.
William Constable, Jr., died before he was thirty-five, never having had the opportunity to live in the house he lovingly built for more than nine years. Now known as Constable Hall, the house in Constableville, N.Y., is on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered by many museum experts as one of America's most delightful restorations.
Constable Hall was patterned after a mansion that stood on the family estate in Ireland and was meant “to surpass all the other houses of that day north of the Mohawk.” Construction began in 1818, the year Constable married. Nine years later, when the house was nearly finished, he was seriously hurt when a
ten-ton capstone that was to be laid in the front portico split and injured his leg. He never recovered, and died two years later.
Constable Hall contains much of its original furniture and a number of rare antiques and articles, among them a satinwood sewing table that belonged to Marie Antoinette; a piano, inlaid and decorated, which came from London in 1812; a seagoing secretary-chest, given to the elder Constable by Alexander Hamilton; a chess set, belonging to an acquaintance of the younger Constable's, Clement Moore, author of “The Night Be fore Christmas;” and a hand-sewn flag of thirteen stars.
In 1800, Joshua Forman, of the Class of 1798, moved to Onondaga Hollow, N.Y., and opened a law office with his brother-in-law. In 1805, while serving in the New York State Assembly, he heard an idea for an inland waterway connecting Lake Erie to the mouth of the Hudson River. He promptly became a canal supporter.
When the Erie Canal was built, the section in Onondaga County went through what would become the village of Syracuse-a locale generally avoided by settlers due to the swampy, fetid living conditions. Forman, however, advertised the advantages of the area, including the location of the intersection of the Great Western Canal and the Seneca Turnpike, the proximity to the salt works, and water power from Onondaga Creek, where three mills were already in operation. When it came time to choose a name for the new community, one man remembered a poem he had read titled “Syracuse,” about a town in Sicily built on a lake with marshes that contained salt and freshwater springs. The similarities were noted, and the new village became Syracuse.
Forman is considered the “founder of Syracuse,” and he was recognized after his death by the creation of Forman Park in the heart of the city. The park's magnificent water fountain, colorful flowers, shady trees, and park benches make it a popular gathering place for neighborhood residents.
George Washington Gale, of the Class of 1814, was a Presbyterian minister from upstate New York who, in the 1830s, conceived of a plan to bring a “thorough system of mental, moral, and physical education” to the frontier. He inspired a band of colonists to set out with him for the prairie of Illinois, where they established an educational institution known as Knox Manual Labor College. Chartered in 1837, the college was among the first open to people of color and to women. In 1957, the name was changed to Knox College.
The college is located in Galesburg, also founded by Gale and his band of twenty-five settlers. The town was home to the first anti-slavery society in the state of Illinois and was a stop on the underground railroad.
The name's familiar
Union's heritage of names is by no means confined to the alumni cited in the main article. It includes, for example, Toomsboro, Georgia, named after Robert A. Toombs, Class of 1828, the first secretary of state for the Confederacy during the Civil War (the “b” got dropped somewhere along the line, according to residents). And Eliphalet Nott, president of the College for sixty-two years, has a stretch of highway named for him in Ashford, Conn.
Nor are all Union names with Union connections as far-flung as those in the article. The city of Schenectady has at least twenty street names with Union connections. Some are obvious-
University Place, Union Avenue, Union Street, Nott Street, Nott Terrace, and Nott Terrace Heights. Some are less so, such as Seward Place, for William Seward, Class of 1820, Lincoln's secretary of state during the Civil War and the man behind the purchase of Alaska; Bigelow Place, for John Bigelow, Class of 1835, Lincoln's ambassador to Paris; and Gillespie Place, for William Gillespie, an internationally recognized pioneer in engineering education and the College's first “Lecturer in Civil Engineering.”