By Joel Thurtell
My wife and I are tutoring English-learners for Washtenaw Literacy. One of our students, a Korean, not knowing about my fascination with how places get their names, brought up the old chestnut about how Novi, Michigan, got its name.
She’d heard that yarn on the radio — it’s a favorite of disc jockeys.
Novi, so the yarn goes, was the sixth station on the plank road leading to Detroit. Hence the monicker, No. VI, shortened to “Novi.”
Or maybe it was the sixth station on the railroad leading from Detroit to Michigan’s hinterland.
Oh yes, possibly it was Station Six on the stagecoach line.
Somehow, sometime, some wit had translated the station number to the place name.
Ha-ha! Those oldtimers, denizens of a bygone era, sure had their senses of humor, didn’t they?
My student wanted to know more about Michigan place names, and I was glad to oblige. The object of my class, which takes place every Friday at a library in Ann Arbor, is to give foreigners a chance to practice speaking and hearing English. So, for an hour and a half, I preside over what some people might think was a glorified bull session. I’ve found that if I bring in interesting material for students to read aloud, we can have fun in a general discussion while learning new words and phrases.
I saw in my student’s request to learn more about place names a chance to have some fun while learning about Michigan geography and history. So I photocopied entries from Walter Romig’s classic reference work, Michigan Place Names.
Romig reported the old “No. VI” story with another competing explanation: that the wife of one of the settlers proposed the Latin word for “new” — “Novi.”
I also photocopied Romig’s entries for Ann Arbor and Zilwaukee.
I’ve always been skeptical about the No. VI story. It’s too cute. For it to be true, we would need to establish some elementary facts: first, that there was a plank road, stage coach or railroad running through Novi; second, that there was in that olden time a Station No. VI situated in present-day Novi.
Since Novi was named in 1832, it seemed unlikely that any of those commercial conveyances would have existed. While Michigan was starting to fill with settlers following the opening of the Erie Canal and the resulting opening of the Great Lakes for transportation in 1825, there still weren’t huge numbers of people in Michigan by the time Novi acquired its name.
It seemed more likely to me that some erudite person with a smattering of Latin had suggested the word for “new” — Novi.
But then I read Romig’s entry for Zilwaukee. The founders of Zilwaukee in the 1850s deliberately named their town to rhyme with “Milwaukee” in hopes they’d misguide German immigrants to settle at their place, rather than in the home of beer and brats, namely Wisconsin.
So there was wit and some fraud too in at least one place name.
Maybe, after all, Novi got its name from some 19th-century humorist.
But no — a belated check with Wikipedia reveals that neither plank road, railroad or stagecoach existed in 1832, when Novi got its name.
Despite the popular misconception, we’ll have to accept the old explanation, which is that the town means “new.”
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
