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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 which
must have promoted the town 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 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.
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