What’s in a place name? Much deliberation from this board.

This business of renaming places because someone says they’re offensive can be complicated stuff. And even the best of intentions can turn messy. Back in 1962, Stewart Udall, who was the secretary of the Interior Department, decided that the
“n-word” should be erased from American maps. What ensued offers a lesson in changing sensibilities. The Board on Geographic Names set about enforcing that decision, and the solution that it often approved was to change
the n-word to another n-word: “negro.”

That worked pretty well for decades, but then attitudes began to shift about the n-word substitute. And the board started to hear about it — over and over and over. It still hears about it. Just this winter, requests have come in to rename Negrohead Creek in Alaska (to Lochenyatth Creek), Negro Creek in California (to Black Miners Creek) and Negro Hill in Colorado (to Aunt Clara Barton Hill).

Personal Post

They’ve been so busy with
the ­de-n-word-ification that 49 names that had been changed from the old offensive n-word
to the new offensive (to some) n-word have since been changed again — to something entirely different, says Lou Yost, the board’s executive secretary and a three-decade veteran of the federal naming enterprise.

Still, the board isn’t inclined to tinker if the locals make a fuss about keeping everything the same. “We’re reactive,” says Doug Caldwell, who represents the Department of Defense on the board. And the locals have reacted strongly for a long time in Garrett County, Md., where Negro Mountain straddles the Pennsylvania border. In the mid-1990s, local politicians talked the board into rejecting a Pennsylvania man’s attempt to rename it Black Hero Mountain.

And that’s why the sign still read Negro Mountain in 1998 when Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore native who had never ventured to Western Maryland, went on a tour of the area for newly elected members of the state House of Delegates. As the bus rolled past the sign, she gasped.

“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding,’ ” recalls Gladden, a Democrat. “I couldn’t stand it.”

Gladden, now a Maryland state senator, learned about the vagaries of place names last year when she introduced a bill to alter the names of Negro Mountain and another geographical feature, Polish Mountain. First off, she says, she discovered that Polish Mountain wasn’t named for natives of the East European nation, but for its polished-looking smoothness. Then she came under withering criticism from a particular Negro Mountain resident, who also happens to be a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Wendell R. Beitzel.

The original family homestead is off Negro Mountain Road, and his ancestors have farmed there for generations. He knew well the story of the African American servant who gave his life to save a white pre-Revolutionary area colonel during a battle with Indians. And he thought Gladden’s suggestion to give the mountain the servant’s name, Nemesis, had negative connotations of its own.

“I think we’re in a time when political correctness is running amok,” Beitzel said in an interview.

Gladden wants to make another attempt. But until The Washington Post asked her, she says, she’d never heard of that board in Washington, the one that renames things. She did have a question, though: “Could you send me their link?”