Despite a plea from one resident, it appears that the town of Silt, which sits about 15 miles west of Glenwood Springs, will keep its humble name. The matter came up last week at a town board meeting after Town Trustee Doug Williams, in the hope of improving the town’s image, had proposed a hearing.
Most people spoke against a name change. Only one favored it, Joyce Esgar. “The name is degrading,” and a new name “would increase the value of our property.” She added that “For this beautiful country, it doesn’t do it justice. When you tell somebody you’re from Silt – and it never fails – they say, ‘Silt? You mean dirt?’ I think a pretty name would be better.”
From a real-estate marketing perspective, she has a point. Property values would doubtless rise if it were rechristened “Grand Mesa Vistas” or “The Estates at Dry Hollow Creek.” I should note, though, that many of us enjoyed the “Silt Happens” bumper stickers that circulated a few years ago.
However, Silt shares a problem with many other Colorado towns: What do you call its residents? Siltans? Siltites? Silters?
This issue came up in Leadville earlier this year when the editor of the Herald-Democrat wanted to resurrect “Leadvillian,” which charmed her after she discovered it in a 19th century paper. But when she surveyed readers, most preferred the more prosaic “Leadvillite,” although there were a few supporters of “Leadhead.”
Around here, some places are simple in this regard, as in Salidan, Buena Vistan and Alamosan. But others are tricky. Nathropians and Villa Grovillians sound good, but I have no idea whether they’re correct, and it’s hard to come up with even a good guess for a Saguache resident.
Elsewhere in our state, at least in Unofficial English, Lamar does best in this regard with “Lamartian,” although the “Montroids” of Montrose and the “Durangutangs” of Durango also deserve recognition.
So Silt has a problem there. And it’s not as though towns don’t change names. I’ve lost track of whether a Silt neighbor is currently Grand Valley or Parachute. Hot Sulphur Springs was once merely Sulphur Springs, and Winter Park was West Portal.
Salida began in 1880 as the South Arkansas railroad station. The South Arkansas post office then was near present-day Poncha Springs. This post office was named Arkansas, and it was all so confusing that the residents begged the railroad for a new name. They got it, complete with the correct pronunciation (“Sah- LEE-dah” in a newspaper of the time), and began mispronouncing it immediately, a tradition that continues to this day.
But if we’re going to talk about new names for Colorado places now, Silt is way down the list.
For instance, there’s Colorado Springs. There’s no convenient term for a resident, since the term “Dittoheads” embraces people far beyond the city limits. The five-syllable name is a mouthful, and even the vernacular short version, “the Springs,” is totally inaccurate, since the namesake springs are actually in Manitou Springs. The “Springs” name was a hustle to attract more real-estate buyers to what had been known as “Fountain Colony.”
Consider Denver. Out here in the hinterlands, it does not mean “the city and county of Denver.” A “run to Denver” could mean an expedition to anywhere from Castle Rock to Fort Collins. We could keep the convenient “Denver” name for that expanse. The city proper could be dubbed “Auraria” – the name of an early competitor on the other side of Cherry Creek, and one that would fit well with other metro place names that start and end with “A,” like Arvada and Aurora.
This shouldn’t hurt real-estate values. As for Silt, there are many other Colorado locales whose prosaic names do not inspire $500,000 lot prices: Punkin Center, Crook, Stringtown, Poverty Gulch, Smeltertown and Yellow Jacket, to name a few.
We should cherish such names, and come up with a few more, if they really do depress the real-estate market – it may be the only way to provide affordable housing these days.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
