The Street Names of Ashburn

One of the most interesting – and bewildering – aspects of living in Ashburn is the variety of street names here. I was delighted during my first explorations of the area to find streets that reminded me of my childhood in Massachusetts: Gloucester Parkway, Marblehead Drive, Cohasset Terrace.

Later, as I learned more about Ashburn's thoroughfares, I had to marvel about the variety and beauty of its onomastics (that's a fancy word that means the study of names). Unlike traditional built-up areas, whose place names accrue as the people move in, our streets, mostly farmland until fairly recently, had to have been named on a blueprint and not when the names were actually needed – but who did the naming? Was it the developer's wife, fresh from her creative writing class? Was it the builder himself, full of memories of places, events and old girlfriends? Or is there somewhere possibly a special naming service with employees like idle poets, science-fiction writers and aspiring space travelers who take over the job?

Anyway, the street names here came before the houses on them.  Those busy namers must have felt like Adam right after the Creation, when the Bible tells us he had the pleasure of lining up all the animals and naming them (Genesis 2:19).

Street names in Ashburn, I find, fall into several categories. Predominately they are names derived from the British: Runnymeade, Cheltenham, Fincastle, and my own Chamberlain. I suppose the namer found something fancy in that, as do those of us who wear London Fog raincoats (made in Baltimore). Other categories are flowers, principally streets off Claiborne Parkway (Hibiscus, Camelia, Heatherbloom) and American writers, just south of Farmwell Road (Sandburg, Hansberry, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and both Twain and Clemens). Only a few street names show Amerindian origins – Agawam, Arapaho, Nashoa. The reason for that surprising scarcity may be that those peoples were eased entirely out of our area almost three hundred years ago, a topic for a whole other essay.

Most delightful of all, however, are the odd names, names that cause speculation about their meaning or origin: Frugality, Crab Orchard, Breezy Hill, Bright Penny, Desert Forest.

Streets, of course, have last names, too. I find no rationality here to what is called a boulevard, a parkway, a drive or, particularly, a terrace. My dictionary tells me that the word “terrace” derives from a Provencal word meaning “pile of dirt.” There are piles of dirt all over Ashburn, one of which I immortalized in an earlier essay, “Save Mount Marblehead!” but none of them are on any street with that appellation. Another meaning for “terrace” is the grassy space in the middle of a street, but, once again, I don't see such a structure on any of our Terraces. (By the way, my GPS doesn't know what a terrace is, and just pronounces it “terrrrr”).

Another last name for streets in these parts is “circle,” though most of the circles I encounter are semicircles, except for Beaumeade Circle, which is shaped more like a Q than an O.

Can someone tell me why I don't find streets that end in “Street” or “Avenue” here? Are these designations considered too plebeian for an upscale neighborhood like ours? I hope not.

No meditation on American onomastics can properly omit a quotation from the best poem about the subject, Stephen Vincent Benet's “American Names”:

I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat …