I focused an inordinate amount of time and attention on Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames as I wrote the Comparison Nicknames article. That wasn’t the original intent of the effort however, just an interesting byproduct that spun into its own topic. I’d been working on something else, something finally revealed today.
It all began when an obvious fact presented itself to me in a new way. There was a major road nearby that ran for about 25 miles from Arlington to Great Falls in Virginia callled Old Dominion Drive. So what, I figured, during my entire lifetime up until a few days ago. Then I recalled that Virginia’s nickname was the Old Dominion State. The connection should have been completely obvious to me years ago although I’d overlooked it somehow. I never claimed to be the brightest kid in class.
The Quest
That led me to wonder whether or not at least one street in every state incorporated its nickname. However, first I needed to know every state nickname, and that led me to the list on Wikipedia, sparking the whole chain of events that brought us here today after the earlier tangent. Only two states didn’t have official nicknames, Alabama and Wisconsin. I called Dealer’s Choice for those and selected Heart of Dixie and the Badger State respectively, finding streets named for each of them without any trouble. It surprised me how quickly I discovered streets even for the most bizarre of nicknames such as Show Me Lane in Camdenton, Missouri (map).
Most were ridiculously easy and provided an abundance of choices. I selected one per state somewhat randomly because I didn’t want to add every occurrence to the map. I suppose I rationalized that as wanting to prevent cluttering although the real reason traced to laziness. Fifty waypoints seemed enough.
Better examples (e.g., longer, more significant roads) likely existed and 12MC readers should feel free to add their favorites in the comments if they feel I may have slighted their home states. Readers outside of the United States can play the game too. Good luck finding “The Land of Seed and Honey” Street in Saskatchewan, though.
The Easiest?
The easiest might have been Delaware. How could I possibly mark every nicknamed street in Delaware? The state called itself the First State. As the state explained,
“Delaware is known by this nickname due to the fact that on December 7, 1787, it became the first of the 13 original states to ratify the U.S. Constitution. ‘The First State’ became the official State nickname on May 23, 2002 following a request by Mrs. Anabelle O’Malley’s First Grade Class at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School. Delaware Code Title 29 § 318”
I was a bit surprised that it didn’t become the official nickname until 2002 although kudos to the kids at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School. However, this resulted in any 1st Street in Delaware sharing a commonality with the state nickname. There must have been hundreds of them. The only thing that might possibly have been worse would have been if Maine had called itself the Main State (it didn’t thank goodness, it selected the Pine Tree State instead). I took a more complicated route and found a few that represented the entire state nickname, for example an actual First State Boulevard in Wilmington (map).
So Many Peaches!
Georgia presented an interesting situation as the Peach State. There were so many Peachtree Streets and variants in its capital city of Atlanta that it became a running joke years ago. By some estimates, there were at least 71 separate occurrences of Peachtree in the city. However, Georgia wasn’t the Peachtree State, it was the Peach State. Oddly enough, there were very few Peach Streets minus the tree although I did manage to find several and I even found one with the full name, Peach State Drive in the town of Adel (map).
The Bay
Most of the states did not include a street with the full nickname, specifically dropping the “state” portion from the street name. Hawaii, as an example, had an Aloha Drive although no Aloha State Drive, and so on. Nonetheless, several did as noted previously for Delaware and Georgia.
The best example may have been Massachusetts. The Bay State had a Bay State Road in Boston that actually traversed a significant place, the campus of Boston University (map). Most of the other examples were stubby little roads serving industrial parks, shopping centers or a few rural homes.
Last place in this friendly competition went to Wyoming. It was the Equality State, a nickname applied when Wyoming became a state in 1890 and was the first to allow women’s suffrage. I had no argument with that, it was a notable historic fact. However I couldn’t find a single Equality Street much less an Equality State Street, making Wyoming the the only state without a nicknamed street. There were several streets that aligned with its unofficial nickname though, the Cowboy State so I took some solace there.
Completely unrelated
At long last, and after years of gentle nudging, Steve from CTMQ finally created a County Counting map. He was up above 700 counties too. Great start!
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