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DELAWARE — Take a drive through Delaware County and you might find yourself on 3 Bs and K Road, Hogback Road or the appropriately named Little Street.
But who decided to call them that?
A Delaware Source reader recently asked how some of the county’s more unusual roads got their names. The answer, it turns out, isn’t always easy to find.
Take Little Street, a roughly 0.1-mile road in downtown Delaware. Its name has nothing to do with its size.
The street was named for William Little, a local merchant who built what is now the Arts Castle for his daughter after she married.
Other names are more mysterious. Records preserved by the Delaware County Historical Society and Delaware County Memory offer clues to the origins of some local roads, but a complete history of the county’s street names may simply be lost to time.
Delaware Source dug through a 1913 book, The Delaware, Ohio, Blue Book; Some Facts and Figgers, consulted Historical Society columnist Becky Cornett and searched historical records to find the stories behind some of Delaware County’s more peculiar street names.
Three bees and a ‘K’ on a hog’s back?
That heading may not be as funny as we thought. Who knows.
Anyway, 3 Bs and K Road is named for the four townships it passes through: Berlin, Berkshire, Brown and Kingston.
Somewhat anticlimactic.
But also in Brown Township is Hogback Road. Preservation Parks currently operates Hogback Ridge Park, the Mary McCoy Nature Center and district offices along the road inside the park.
According to Preservation Parks’ website about Hogback Ridge’s history, McCoy and her husband bought the property in the 1960s and built a ranch-style home that overlooked Slate Lick Creek.
The park’s website cites a July 8, 1998, Delaware Gazette article describing Mary McCoy’s lifelong interest in animals and wildlife.
“She fed everything,” Melvin Rheins, the executor of McCoy’s estate and a family friend, was quoted as saying.
After McCoy’s death, she left 32 acres to the park district in 1998. Preservation Parks later named the nature center on the property in her honor.
Additionally, a “hogback” is a type of geological formation.
Hogbacks are narrow ridges with a steep rock face on one side and a more gradual slope on the other, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Arts and Sciences Magazine. The geological formations can be found around the world — and even on Mars.
So, does Hogback Road get its name from McCoy feeding the animals on her property, including hogs? Or does it have more to do with the nearby Slate Lick Creek ravine, which resembles a hogback geological formation?
Maybe it’s just a fascinating coincidence.
From OWU presidents to pioneer settlements
Merrick Boulevard runs just beyond Oakhurst Park, dead-ending at railroad tracks near Smith Park.
Cornett said that the road is named after Dr. Frederick Merrick, who was the president at Ohio Wesleyan University from 1860 to 1873. OWU’s Merrick Hall also bears his name.
OWU historian Henry Clyde Hubbart described Merrick as the “Grand Old Man of Delaware,” according to the university.
A biographical memoir published after Merrick’s death in 1894 was even more effusive: “Had an angel visited Delaware and asked us to name our best man and our most useful citizen, our people would have unanimously nominated Frederick Merrick.”
The ever-so-traveled Cheshire Road has a similar origin story to 3 Bs and K Road.
Cheshire was an early Delaware County settlement in what is now Brown Township.
The area was largely known as Fort Cheshire and featured a blockhouse that stood from about 1812 to 1820 near what is now the family campground at Alum Creek State Park, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
The two-story blockhouse was one of four built in Delaware County to protect residents from attacks in the years leading up to the War of 1812, according to ODNR.
“The top floor hung over the bottom floor, which allowed the inhabitants to shoot, drop boiling water on attackers, and stop attackers from setting the structure on fire from a raised location,” the agency’s website states.
After the War of 1812, the blockhouse took on a decidedly less defensive role. It was used as a school and as a meeting place for a local Baptist congregation, according to ODNR.
A few more road-name rabbit holes
Many Delaware County road names preserve the names of farms and families that once occupied the land around them, according to Cornett.
Hyphenated names such as Hills-Miller and Bean-Oller roads often reflect farms that existed along those routes, either before or after the roads themselves were established.
Steitz Road, near the Delaware County District Library’s Liberty branch, was named for the Steitz family farm, which raised Percheron horses, Cornett said.
The powerful draft horses were commonly used to pull stagecoaches. Cornett said Delaware County was once a premier place for stagecoaches — and the horses needed to pull them.
Pollock Road has similar roots. Cornett said it was named for another farm that raised Percherons.
“Hyatts Road is named after Hyattsville that was a railroad town — now a remnant. Swan Lake event center’s pond was once the source of water for the steam trains that stopped for ‘fuel’ at Hyatts Station,” Cornett said in an email.
“Sandusky Street was once part of the Columbus-Sandusky Pike — which has a huge history of its own — it was the main North-South highway through here until the bypass was built and the traffic rerouted to the new U.S. Route 23 road.”
Vans Valley Road in Sunbury is named after the Van Dorn Inn.
“Gilbert Van Dorn opened the first tavern in Trenton Township in 1817,” a history of the Van Dorn Inn states. “A four-room log structure was the center of the rapidly growing community of Vans Valley, named after Van Dorn.”
Two East Delaware roads, Flax and Lake Streets, have some interesting histories and are still making headlines today due to development and flooding issues in the area.
“Flax Street in Delaware is named for the 1800s flax mill that was there, and now is serving as the community center/clubhouse for the Mill on Flax apartment community,” Cornett said.
“Lake Street is named for Greenwood Lake in history — a popular resort — now a housing development. The lake was drained years ago.”
And then there’s Africa Road, which has an origin story all its own. Cornett previously traced its history in her column on Alum Creek:
