The explorers had a name for places... so did Puget Sound pioneers.

Whidbey Islanders are great at names; many of our streets are named for or by those same pioneers. Oak Harbor’s Cackle Corner at the junction of Highway 20 south and Swantown Road, caused many a newcomer to take a double look. But it all fits in nicely when we hear that in the early part of the century, three chicken farmers located at this junction. It was Cackle Corner then... it still is!

So it is with Monkey Hill, Eight Squaw Point, Dugualla Bay, Flintstone Park, Noisy Circle, Easy Street, and other locations on North Whidbey. There’s always a reason, and therefore a name!

When America was settled, the pioneers named places and rivers and mountains and lakes after European place names, then as years went on and covered wagons rumbled across the territory, they recalled their homes on the East Coast and named towns after them. Traveling across country, Indian names described the areas according to water, plains, etc., and the settlers adapted phonetically their names to the names we know today.

From this hodgepodge of place names, come the names of Walla Walla, Mukilteo, Skagit, Snohomish, Skykomish, Whatcom and Yakima and others, Indian tribes and descriptive appellations that have become ordinary to the Washingtonian. The British, Spanish and American explorers also had their day in the sun when they named mountains and Islands after crew members and European landmarks. Other areas were named for “lands of dreams,” such as Acme, Opportunity... and Freeland.

Our neighbor to the northeast, Mount Vernon, carries the name of our first President’s home; the Skagit River is a memorial to an Indian tribe. Whidbey Island is named for Captain George Vancouver’s First Mate Joseph Whidbey; Coupeville for an early day sea captain, and Oak Harbor for the regal Garry Oak!

The San Juan Islands carry interesting place names. Spanish explorer Eliza named Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, the largest of San Juan County’s 172 named Islands. The San Juan group makes up the state’s smallest county: San Juan, Orcas Island, Lopez to name a few. Camanio (which became Camano), Fidalgo, and Galiano Islands were named by the Spanish.

Lt. Wilkes of the American Navy, on his expedition, renamed everything he saw in northwest waters that was not recorded on British maps. There were a lot of islands out there, and Shaw, Blakely, Decatur and Sinclair Islands came into being along with dozens of other English names. When the British Admiralty chose to rework the charts to prevent confusion, most English names were retained; some American names also, and many Spanish names reinstated.

Along the lower reaches of the Columbia River a powerful tribe of Indian traders lived, who adopted a simple version of Chinookan, their official language. The Chinook jargon spread all over the northwest with both Indians and whites using it to communicate. It was used by both the “King George” Tillicums and the American “Bostonmen.”

When a Greek navigator Apostolos Valerianos, who sailed the Pacific in 1592, spun the tale of finding the long-sought “Strait of Anian,” it was entered on English charts. The nonexistent and long sought Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean was brought to life and interest in the Pacific Northwest rekindled.

We often took the Illahee or the Klickitat ferry to and from Port Townsend. Klickitat was named for an Indian tribe and means “beyond.” It referred to the Cascade Mountains, as the Klickitats were intermediaries in the fur trade. Illahee is the Indian term for “earth” or “country”; no reference to that broad expanse of water the ferry crosses!

Memaloos Island in the Columbia River was used by the Klickitat Indians as a cemetery. “Memaloos” in Indian means “dead” and this was the cry used by fleeing Haidah Indians in the early 1850s when Captain Ed Barrington of Oak Harbor scared them off from a raid on the local Indian village by placing a skull on the end of a stick and dancing a “devil dance.”

“Memaloos! Memaloos!” they shouted as they piled into their war canoes and left, never to return!

South Whidbey has many areas that were named before they were settled. Saratoga was named by the Wilkes expedition of 1841 in honor of the USS Saratoga commanded by Captain Thomas Donough of Lake Champlain.

Maxwelton was named by the McKee brothers in memory of the bonnie braes of Scotland.

Clinton at one time was known as Phinney because the post office was located where Jim and John Phinney’s resort was. When they moved it, for a while it had two names, but in 1892 it legally became Clinton. Clinton was named in 1884 by Ed Hinman, who was from Clinton, Massachusetts.

Holmes Harbor was named in 1841 by the Wilkes Expedition in honor of a surgeon with the expedition. Glendale was given its name by Mrs. E. M. Peck who thought Glendale was such a beautiful place and deserved a beautiful name.

Camano Island was first called McDonough’s Island. Indians called Whidbey “Paradise.” Captain Vancouver named it Whidbey in honor of the officer who charted it, First Mate Joseph Whidbey.

The “e” in Whidbey Island was later dropped by record-keepers, and it remained “Whidby” until the U.S. Navy, in the 1940s, insisted on returning it to Whidbey as it appeared on the charts. The citizenry, especially on Central Whidbey, was not happy about it but eventually had to give in. The Masonic Lodge of Whidby Island in Coupeville refused to change.

People from “away” are often mystified by Washington State names. Many come from the Indian jargon used by early-day settlers and originating in the communications between French Canadian trappers and the Indian tribes of Oregon.

Scatchet Head on South Whidbey is the southernmost bluff and reflects one of the early spellings of the name of the Indian tribe living there, the Skagits.

Bow, in Skagit County, was named after the large railway station in London during the railroad “boom.”

Guemes Island, just north of Fidalgo was named in honor of the viceroy of Mexico by Spanish explorer Eliza in 1791-92.

Sequim, on the Olympic Peninsula, is a Clallam Indian name for “quiet water.”

Mount Shuksan, (Mount Baker) came from the Skagit Indian name meaning “rocky and precipitous.“

Anacortes was renamed in 1876 from Ship Harbor, by Amos Bowman, town platter and promoter who gave it a Spanish-sounding version of his wife’s maiden name “Anna Curtis.”

La Conner was also named after a woman, the wife of John S. Conner who in 1869 changed the name from Swinomish to honor Louise Anne Conner.

Edison, north of Mount Vernon in Skagit County, immortalized the inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

And so it goes, on and on...

Lee Brainard moved to Whidbey as a Navy wife in 1961 and worked for the local paper. She moved onto the base in 1970 where she spent the next 15 years as editor and reporter for the Navy Crosswind. During that time she started working for Dorothy Neil, editing and publishing nine of Dorothy books and editing Spindrift Magazine. In 1990 she and her husband published the Town Crier, an Oak Harbor community newspaper. She is also an active member of the Oak Harbor Soroptimist club.