Place Name Favourites

20 years after the publication of Concise Place Names of Alberta, it feels like the right time for a revisit. I recently spent some hours browsing through the book’s now two decade-old pages, and I’m glad I did.

Looking through the compressed backstories of Alberta’s sites and spaces was a worthwhile reminder of how this kind of volume can be assembled by a dedicated researcher into a very readable package.

With photos on every page—yes, every page—and bright, all-caps headings for each entry, reading the 400-plus pages presented here doesn’t feel like a chore.

In her Introduction, Aubrey shares a nugget of provincial place-naming lore that spurred a renaissance in toponymic studies in her part of Canada.

As the story goes, American general Dwight D. Eisenhower visited Canada in 1946 and Prime Minister MacKenzie King, in honour of the visit, directed the Geographic Board of Canada to rename Castle Mountain, located in Alberta, to “Mount Eisenhower.”

Apparently, a lot of Albertans took umbrage at the move.

Although the renaming was duly undertaken, “the heavy-handed action of the federal government caused Alberta to take a closer look at how features were named in Alberta.”

Turning to the “Castle Mountain” entry on page 98 we learn how things eventually turned out: “Because of strong public opinion, the name was officially changed back to Castle Mountain in 1979.”

When books about place names appear on the scene, they typically don’t get a ton of fanfare in mainstream outlets. Still, Alan Kellogg of the Edmonton Journal took note of Concise Place Names in his Sunday column on February 18, 2007.

To Alan, the book was “undoubtedly the niftiest Alberta reference book of the year” and “a fine addition to any family’s coffee table, car pocket or library.”

And if you’re like me, you may appreciate the pull quote the Journal featured above the fold: “New book makes us all toponymists, folks who study place names and rediscover a slice of the past.” Newspapers may be ephemeral, but that’s gold right there.

As for “Concise” in the title, a bit of background.

Aubrey’s edition is a kind of distilled iteration of its forerunner, the four-volume Place Names of Alberta series that appeared from the University of Calgary Press in the 90s. Aubrey, who retired as head of the Alberta Geographical Names Program several years ago, co-wrote and was actively involved in that quartet of interesting books.

Devotees of factual rigour will welcome the pages early on in the book titled “Miscellaneous explanatory notes” and “Brief history of geographical naming in Canada and Alberta”. Both are rewarding. There’s a lot of good stuff here.

Altogether, it’s hard to argue with the Aubrey’s view that the “fascination with place names is perhaps more pronounced in Alberta than in other provinces and is shown by the number of books written on the subject.”

With the perspective that 20 years brings, I’ll venture to say that Concise Place Names of Alberta merits a standout spot in any collection of those works.