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PLACE NAMES: More Kootenay names shared with other places

You’ll find a Trail in Minnesota, a Warfield in England, and a Christina Lake in Alberta
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Castlegar, a stately manor at Ahascragh, County Galway, Ireland, is seen in an engraving from 1820. It’s the namesake of Castlegar, BC. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

Two hundred fifty-second in a series on West Kootenay/Boundary place names

Continuing our look at places elsewhere on the planet that share names with local communities, there are five Castlegars in Ireland (as well as a Castlebar), the largest of which is a village and parish in County Galway.

For many years it was unclear which of these might have been the namesake of Castlegar, BC, but it turned out to be an estate at Ahascragh, also in County Galway, which was the ancestral home of Edward Mahon. He came to the West Kootenay in the 1890s to invest in local mines and laid out the Castlegar townsite. However, its development was very slow due to a deadlock with the CPR, and Mahon’s association with Castlegar was soon forgotten. The full story is told in Walter Volovsek’s book, The Green Necklace: The Vision Quest of Edward Mahon.

Castlegar House in Ireland, built around 1815, is still standing, although it’s no longer in the Mahon family. Its former stables are now a B&B.

Trail, Missouri was named for a local family and a post office operated there from 1890-98. There’s also a Trail, Oregon, at the mouth of Trail Creek, and a Trail, Minnesota, pop. 46. The latter was named for a Native American trail that passed near the original townsite.

In Virginia, you’ll find Warfield, pop. 115. It was named after Solomon Davies Warfield (1859-1927), president of the Seabord Air Line Railway and an uncle to Wallis Warfield Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor. He didn’t seem to be any relation to Carlos Warfield, namesake of our village.

You’ll also find a Warfield, pop. 10,000, in the English county of Berkshire. It was an Anglo-Saxon settlement, recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Warwelt. The name is believed to be derived from Old English waer feld, meaning “open land by a weir.”

You’ll need more than all your fingers and toes to count the places named Montrose. There are 27 in the US, plus two in Australia, and one each in Guyana, Ireland, Scotland, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia. Our Montrose was apparently inspired by the one in Scotland.

The only other Salmo is an unincorporated community in Wisconsin. Like our Salmo, it takes its name from the fish genus.

Eleven places in the US are called Creston, plus one in Newfoundland, but it’s the one in Iowa (pop. 7,800) that’s namesake to the one in BC. Fred Little, a founder of our Creston, once worked in Iowa.

Grand Forks, BC is occasionally mixed up with Grand Forks, North Dakota, population 53,000. The latter is located on the Red River of the North. There’s also a Grand Forks Township in Minnesota.

There are about 45 places in the US called Greenwood, plus three in Ontario and two in Nova Scotia. One of the latter is home to a Canadian Forces airbase.

The US has 33 places named Midway. Others can be found in New Brunswick, Ontario, and England.

There are three other Christina Lakes. One is in Alberta, named for Christine Gordon, the first white woman to live permanently in the Fort McMurray area. Another is in Minnesota and is said to have been named for a pioneer woman of Swedish descent. The third is in Florida and is a mine excavation that was landscaped into a lake. The name’s origin is unclear.

Phoenix, Arizona (pop. 1.6 million) has fared better than Phoenix, BC (pop. zero). The latter was named after a mining claim which probably owed its name to the mythical bird.

Two places in England are named Sandon: one in Staffordshire (pop. 361) and another in Essex (pop. 1,612). The latter’s name is derived from “sand dune” and was formerly spelled Sandun and Sandone.

The Lower Arrow Lake ghost town of Brooklyn was presumably named after the New York City borough, in turn named after the Dutch village of Breukelen.

A Minnesota syndicate bought the Alamo and Idaho mines in the Slocan Valley 1892 and built a concentrator at a spot between New Denver and Three Forks that they called New Duluth, after the city from whence they came. But it couldn’t compete with Alamo, the name by which the area was much better known.

St. Leon Hot Springs take their name either from Saint-pol-de-Léon, France or from one of the many Saint-Léons in Quebec.

Blewett was formerly known as Belford, which might have been named after a place in Northumberland, England. Nearby Shirley possibly owed its name to a district in the West Midlands of England.

Thrums is named after a fictional Scottish village based on Kirriemuir. The three waterfalls on the Kootenay River — Bonnington, Corra Linn, and Stonebyres — were named after corresponding falls on the River Clyde in Scotland, although Stonebyres has fallen out of use locally.