Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
There is a place called Sugar Tit in the county where I grew up. On the west side of Spartanburg County in the South Carolina upcountry is an unincorporated community colloquially (and proudly) referred to as Sugar Tit, although its official government name is Pelham.
“This area was settled by the Scots-Irish,” said Sugar Tit resident Kathy Jordan in an interview with a Greenville News reporter back in 2015. “They were all really hard workers and all farmers. They needed women in the fields. They would take their babies in the fields with their blankets. They’d put sugar cane in the blanket, dip it in water, and that would help them keep those babies in the field while mom would work. They called it a sugar tit. It’s like the first pacifier.”
After working in the fields, local men loafed at the nearby general store, smoking and playing cards. Mothers used to send their children off to fetch their fathers. “He must have a sugar tit up there,” Kathy said. “Send him home.”
According to a 1991 article in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, you might get mixed results if you ask Sugar Tit residents where they live.
“Most of the time I tell them Sugar Tit,” said 71 year-old Willard Burns in an interview with a Herald-Journal reporter. “No, I ain’t ashamed to tell them I’m from Sugar Tit. Now my wife, she won’t tell them she’s from Sugar Tit, but I will. It’s always been called that, and I don’t think nothin’ of it.”
Inspired by Sugar Tit, I went on a hunt for towns named after body parts. I checked listicles, read old comments on now-defunct Facebook groups, and visited Reddit threads on r/AskHistorians. For this edition of the Rural Index, I made a map of place names that refer to human anatomy.
The data for this map comes from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), a database established in 1978 by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which tracks more than 2 million place names in the United States and its territories. The names in this database include both populated places, like cities and towns, and geographic features, like creeks, mountain peaks, knobs, and other environmental characteristics.
I downloaded spreadsheets associated with my search terms – elbow, finger, knee, nipple, nose, thumb, toe. I don’t think my editor will let me tell you everything I searched for, but you can view my final list by hovering over the tile in the right-hand corner of the map. After downloading my spreadsheets, I joined the data to the Daily Yonder’s list of nonmetropolitan counties, then filtered out the metropolitan places.
Some of these place names might appear to be named after body parts, but are actually just bastardizations of indigenous words. Take the Toe Rivers in North Carolina, for example. Toe is a misspelling of the Cherokee name of a trail that linked towns in northwestern South Carolina to northeastern Georgia, called Estatoe and pronounced ‘S – ta – toe’.
One of the most common anatomical place names is Elbow. In nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, there are 241 places with Elbow in the name, 80 of which are named “Devil’s Elbow.” More than 100 of the 849 places on my map refer to the devil – like the Devil’s Elbow Swamp in Osceola, Florida, or a cape in Alaska called the Devil’s Thumb.
About 80 place names refer to fingers (i.e. Devil’s Finger in Alaska), 22 place names refer to knees, 61 place names refer to thumbs, and 65 place names refer to noses, nine of which are some variation of “The Devil’s Nose.”
There are 68 place names that refer to nipples, most of which are mountain peaks named after white women, like Maggie’s Nipple in Garfield County, Colorado. Instead of referring to specific people, places named after indigenous women frequently use a slur coupled with the derogatory“tit” rather than the more anatomical variation, “nipple.”
Cartographic Violence
What can be said of history books can also be said of maps – they are written by the victors. Historically, governments and religious authorities have tried to reserve the power of map-making for themselves, using cartography to identify, quantify, and divide, a process that, like gerrymandering or redlining, benefits some and exploits others.
A 2015 investigation by Vocativ journalists found that the GNIS contained thousands of references to racist slurs. That year, California alone had 159 offensive place names. More than five hundred place names used slurs that targeted Black Americans, while hundreds more used racial slurs offensive to Asian people. But the most widely used slur was one that targeted and oversexualized indigenous women. Not only did white settlers erase indigenous names, or even care to learn them at all, they replaced many of their names with racist ones. Some of these indigenous names have been restored in recent years and many other slurs have been replaced with less offensive, though still anglicised, names. In 2023, the state of Washington approved nine name changes that restored the indigenous names of places.
People have always challenged cartographic power. In 1901, investigative journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells put American racism on the map. She used quantitative data to map lynchings in her famous essay, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” rebutting the racist notion that lynching was a method of self-defense to protect white women.
Space is layered, physically and emotionally. That complexity is part of what makes maps so fascinating to me. Every map belies the values of its maker, from my county-level maps on election returns to the conceptual maps you might sketch in your journal. What if you had to draw a map of your commute to work? What would you choose to include – just the road lines and traffic lights, or would you also map the trees on the highway, categorized by species? What about the hawk perched on a power line, or the road kill on the shoulder of the interstate?
This complexity is also what gives the cartographer so much power. President Trump’s orders to change place names is an embarrassing and racist attempt to exert this kind of power, a kind of power as old as militarism. Map-makers decide what gets hidden and what gets emphasized. Choices are necessary because including every detail is impossible, a phenomenon geographers refer to as the cartographic paradox. If you did try to include everything, the map would end up being as large and unusable as the space itself.
In his humorous essay “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, Umberto Eco spent the better part of 10 pages guiding the reader through the challenges one might face when making a life-size map. Displaying this massive map on top of vegetation would smother it and therefore require alterations if it were to stay true to itself. But alterations wouldn’t be perfect because the cartographer wouldn’t be able to see through the opacity of the map, so Eco recommended a suspended map held up by stakes with elevations equal to those of its relief points.
“When the map is installed over all the territory … the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map,” Eco wrote nearing the end of the piece. “The map does not take account of this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map.” In other words, abstraction is essential.
In 1891, when the USPS, formerly known as the Post Office Department, required towns to eliminate what it called “casual, whimsical, and freakish names,” it was an effort to simplify and standardize. A town name as famous as Sugar Tit, South Carolina, doesn’t even show up in the GNIS.
The post A Brief History of Anatomical Place Names appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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