Browns (or Brown) Summit and the Disappearing Apostrophe

A decision from more than 130 years ago changed the way that we refer to places. That doesn't stop people from calling things whatever the hell they want.

Last week, a Rabbit Hole reader asked me to figure out whether a town in North Carolina is named Harrell or Harrells (spoiler: it’s the one with the s). This prompted Greensboro meteorologist Tim Buckley to wonder about another place that can’t seem to figure out its own name:

The place Tim is referring to here is about 20 minutes north of downtown Greensboro, and it’s not technically a town. Meaning: It was never incorporated, has no mayor, that sort of thing. But! It is a place with a post office, school, churches, storage facilities, and so on. Problem is: Nobody can agree on whether there’s an “s” on the end of the name. The post office and United Methodist Church is named for Browns Summit. The middle school and main road through town carry the name “Brown Summit.”

So, why can’t everyone agree on what this place is actually called? Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have already seen the answer, but I’m writing this down here, for posterity (and to get one last grammar-focused newsletter out of my system). Because it’s really a story about norms, obscure rules about apostrophes, and a person’s ability to squabble about the smallest of things.

A Federal Campaign Against Apostrophes

First off, this place was originally called Brown’s Summit. With an apostrophe. It’s not actually a summit. In fact, it’s not even the highest point in Guilford County. Neither is High Point. Instead, both places were named because they were high points along a railroad line. The Brown in Brown’s Summit was a dude name Jesse Brown, a farmer and Confederate soldier who owned the land nearby when the Richmond and Danville Railroad was built through the area in 1863.

During those early years, the place name was possessive: Brown’s Summit (as was the aforementioned Harrells, which was once known as Harrell’s Store). Books and directories from the mid to late 1800s include the apostrophe in Brown’s Summit. But during the last decade of the 19th century, apostrophes in place names all across the country begin to disappear. What happened?

A few years ago, the Las Vegas Review-Journal took a look at this because people wondered why apostrophes were missing from places like Dantes View, Devils Golf Course, Artists Palette, and Devils Cornfield. Turns out, they were wiped out by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names shortly after it was established in 1890:

As it still states in the board’s “Principles, Polices and Procedures” manual: “The word or words that form a geographic name change their connotative function and together become a single denotative unit. They change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities. The need to imply possession or association no longer exists.”

In other words, that golf course or cornfield belongs to everyone now, not just the devil.

There have only been a handful of exceptions to this rule, most notably Martha’s Vineyard, which successfully mounted a campaign to get its apostrophe back in the 1930s. For most other places, the apostrophe simply disappeared.

(A quick note: In the last newsletter, I mentioned that there are two towns in North Carolina that have apostrophes in their names: Cajah’s Mountain and Wilson’s Mills. That first town was incorporated in 1983 because people there were worried about being annexed by nearby Lenoir. The General Assembly gave it the name Cajah Mountain, but the locals didn’t like it, and voted to add the apostrophe back to the name in 1985. Wilson’s Mills was chartered with that name in 1996, but the post office in town refuses to use the apostophe. Before you go out and try to make a citizen’s arrest, know this: The head of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names said that there’s no real enforcement mechanism anyway.)

So, Brown’s Summit became Browns Summit, which is what’s denoted on this map of Guilford County from 1895, which also shows the ancestors of current state agriculture commissioner Steve Troxler living nearby:

Hence, this has officially been the name of this place for about 130 years. That settles it! Except, no. Even before this new rule took effect, people were referring to it as "Brown Summit." I looked back through newspaper archives for this, and found the earliest appearance of that name in an article from the Greensboro Patriot in 1872.

Spelling is more of an Art than a Science

If you’re wondering why there are a few different versions of the name floating around, here’s one theory: Precise spelling is a fairly recent phenomenon in the course of human history. Noah Webster didn’t publish the first American dictionary until 1806. The Spelling Reform movement picked up steam in the late 1800s, but before that, a lot of people did their own thing. Hence Brown and Browns were used a little bit interchangeably in documents for most of the 20th century (although nobody seems to have missed the apostrophe). It wasn't until 1993 when this really became A Thing. That year, folks there got tired of people looking at signs and asking what the proper name was. Some people petitioned the Guilford County Commission to officially call it “Brown Summit.” In January 1993, commissioners agreed, the post office followed suit, and removed the “s.”

But around the same time, the post office mailed out surveys everyone who lived in the Browns (or Brown) Summit postal area and asked them what they preferred. It was close, but 51% wanted "Browns," so the post office went with that and put the "S" back on the building in June 1993.

A Greensboro News & Record story about Browns Summit’s official naming in 1993.

Basically, this bait-and-switch gave people license to do things like, say, write letters to the editor about it. “We know that grammatically the name ain’t exactly correct, however, we know where it is, what it is, we love it and most of us call it home, poor grammar and all,” said a man in 1995 who couldn’t let Brown go.

The result here is that there’s an official name, and then there’s the name that people just put on signs because they want to. Older things, like roads, schools, and churches tend to go with Brown. Newer things, like storage facilities, tend to follow the official post office spelling of Browns. Guilford County’s government website seems to use Brown and Browns interchangably, and an official NCDOT road sign in nearby Oak Ridge shows the distance from there to Brown Summit.

It’s a damn mess out there, although the aformentioned Steve Troxler, who’s arguably Brown(s) Summit’s most famous resident, goes with the “s” in his official bio.

So what should you call it? Whatever you like, folks. That’s what people in that particular place have been doing for more than a century. But had the feds not decided to get rid of apostrophes more than 130 years ag, we probably wouldn’t be having this debate today. Yet here we are. That is, I guess, what Brown can do for you.