It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “I’m willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list of one. I finished searching pretty much immediately as I pondered Newport News, an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It led down all sorts of interesting tangents. Maybe I’ll return to the original quest someday although not today.
News
Newport News (map), in alignment with the previous entry, had two New opportunities of course. I started with the second one, News. Following the comical progression introduced by KCJeff, I wondered if New S had surpassed S. I figured it hadn’t since regular old S seemed to be doing just fine on its own.
All kidding aside, News seemed an odd choice to append to a city name. Historians offered several possible explanations and it had been subject to considerable speculation. News might be a corruption of the surname of an early colonial official, Sir William Newce, or it might not.
Newport
Historians generally believed the Newport part derived from Captain Christopher Newport. They interpreting the available evidence and seemed to lean towards that conclusion. Unfortunately a piece of paper saying, “hey, we named this for Chris” didn’t exist or it remained lost to history.
That also reminded me of an earlier 12MC article where the captain of a ship inspired placenames in his figurative or possibly literal wake: Named for Captain Cook. I don’t know if there will be any other articles in the “Named for Captain” series. However, if it becomes a trilogy I think I call the next “Named for Cap’n Crunch.”
Thus a city in Virginia likely derived at least partially from Christopher Newport. That wouldn’t have seemed likely during the earlier part of his career. He spent most of his adult life as a privateer; a legal pirate. He plundering Spanish and Portuguese cargo ships for personal profit and the financial gain of English investors who bankrolled his adventures.
Then he commanded a fleet of three ships that brought an initial round of settlers to Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English settlement in what would later become the United States. That was enough to transform him from pirate-by-another-name to noble historical figure.
Along the James River
Logically one would assume that most things named for Newport would happen to be located in proximity to his several supply voyages to the Jamestown colony. That was mostly true. The preponderance fell along Virginia’s James River as one would expect, the riverine highway that led to and from Jamestown.
For example, educators established an institution of higher learning in Newport News in 1961, initially naming it Christopher Newport College. It’s currently Christopher Newport University (map).
Also, local officials named Newport Avenue in the Colonial Place and Riverview neighborhoods (map) for Christopher Newport. A variety of other tidewater Virginia roads likely paid homage to Newport as well. However, the occurrence in Norfolk was the only one that I could document with absolute certainty.
Elsewhere in Virginia and a little farther upstream, one can visit the Christopher Newport Cross in Richmond (map). As noted on a nearby inscription,
“On May 24, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport and a party of explorers who had landed at Jamestown just days earlier arrived at the site of modern-day Richmond. Hoping to find a passage to the Pacific, they found instead a fortified Indian village with outlying agricultural fields. Newport… traveled the next day a short distance upstream. There he planted a cross in honor of King James I of England, probably on a small islet not too far from the fall line.”
The current cross along Richmond’s Canal Walk dated to 1907. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities commissioned it for “the tercentenary of Christopher Newport’s visit.”
Newport, Kentucky
Newport, Kentucky seemed distant from Christopher Newport’s legacy both in time and miles (map). While definitely a “new port” on the expanding frontier of the nascent United States, the name did not derive from its foothold along the Ohio River. Neither did they name it for an earlier Newport unlike nearly every other place bearing that name (e.g., Newport, Rhode Island). The Kentucky town across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio definitely commemorated Christopher Newport.
General James Taylor founded the original settlement in 1795 on land that he’d inherited from his father. The Taylor family had a multi-generational history of wealth and privilege that traced back to the early colonial plantations of Virginia. For example, President Zachary Taylor came from the same extended family. This historical connection to Virginia traveled with Taylor to his home on the frontier. Thus, it provided a context for the naming of Newport in Kentucky.
Named, In the Past Tense
Champlain Mountain’s summit (map) rises more than a thousand feet on Mount Desert Island, a popular hiking destination in Maine’s Acadia National Park. It wasn’t always Champlain Mountain though. Once it was Mount Newport.
The artist Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School painted this mountain in the early 1850’s. Back then it was still named for Christopher Newport. It seemed odd to commemorate Newport in a place so far removed from his haunts. And I guess that others must have felt the same or they wouldn’t have changed the name.
The painting sold at auction in 2000 for $4.186 million. Now that would be something any privateer would love to plunder.
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