With roads and communities known as Coal Mountain, Frogtown and Jot Em Down, it’s no secret Forsyth County has some interesting place names, but what might be less well-known is how those names came to be.

On Tuesday, Frank Clark, a founder and curator of the Bell Research Center, hosted a discussion at the center’s facility on Atlanta Highway on Tuesday to discuss some of the more unique place names across the county.

“There’s a lot of great names here that are hard to make sense of, but the great thing about all these old names — the creeks, the rivers, the mountains, the districts, the roads, all that — if you learn it, you’ve learned a lot of history in the county because at that time back then, the name, even if it was crazy, it meant something,” Clark said.

Clark admitted that for some of the names, the origins have been lost to history. 

“On all these, there tends to be more than one story,” he said. “So I’m going to give one, if not two stories, at least give you the one that I believe and you can judge for yourself.”

Forsyth County

The namesake of Forsyth County is one of the less ambiguous local names.

The county is named for John Forsyth, a former governor and senator representing Georgia and the 13th Secretary of State.

“He had a long career in politics in Washington, D.C., as well as in Georgia. He was an ambassador. He had all kinds of appointments,” Clark said. “I think his greatest achievement might be that he brought Florida to the United States. It may be that President [Donald] Trump learned something from him before he wrote ‘The Art of the Deal,’ because he got it for nothing. That’s pretty good deal-making.”

Clark pointed out that Forsyth’s father, Robert Forsyth, was the first U.S. Marshall killed in the line of duty and the Marshall Service has a valor award named in his honor.

Cumming

While the county’s name was easy, Clark said the city’s namesake is up for debate.

Commonly, the city is thought to be named after Col. William Cumming and Sir Alexander Cumming, an Englishman who arranged American Indians to meet with royalty and convinced the Cherokee to align with the English in the War of 1812.

Clark said those two explanations were “total nonsense.”

Clark said Col. Cumming was known for serving in the War of 1812 and dueling with South Carolina Congressman George McDuffie but said he was Augusta-based and felt the name was tied to him after the fact. 

Sir Cumming, Clark said, is an unlikely candidate as he convinced the Cherokee to fight against Americans.

Clark said he believed the name was tied to Jacob Scudder, “the first prominent citizen” of the area in 1815. A Wilkes County native, Scudder received land in the 1832 Georgia Land Lottery in north Forsyth but, as luck would have it, was able to buy land in present-day downtown Cumming from a former schoolmate.

“Where did the name Cumming come from? Well, you’ve got these two guys that were both students at the academy in Wilkes County and their professor was Rev. Frederick Cumming,” Clark said. “And I think two and two equals four.”

Hightower

Clark said many of the most historic names were in north Forsyth and along what is now Hwy. 369, as that was along the federal road from Augusta to Tennessee.

One of those existing names is Hightower, along the Etowah River, from which it gets its name.

Clark said the Cherokee pronunciation of Etowah emphasized the middle syllable, which rhymed with now. 

“We didn’t have anything in English that was Etowah, but we came close with Hightower,” he said. 

A popular name for the area is also Frogtown, which dates back to the 1830s. Clark said James Kell, a Cherokee businessman, was on essentially a “pub crawl,” having one drink at one bar, then another drink at another and so on.

“He’d been indoors during the day and into the evening. He was at a bar drinking, everyone was noisy, he stumbles out on the front porch and he is hit with this cacophony of natural sounds and everything else, and he just bellowed out as loud as he could, ‘They ought to call this place Frogtown.’ Everyone got such a kick out of it, they started, as a joke, saying, ‘Oh, it’s over there in Frogtown,’ and the name stuck.”

Eagles Beak

In the Hightower area and along the Etowah sits Eagles Beak Park which is near Eagle Point Landfill. The “Eagle” in both names refers to the shape of the river.

“It was universal, this worship of the eagle,” Clark said. “If you follow it over, here’s the head, here’s the wing and here’s the beak, and that’s where the park is.”

Jot Em Down

One of the Forsyth County’s most unique road names is a case of life imitating art.

In the early days of radio, the comedy program “Lum and Abner” featured the two characters as owners of the Jot ‘em Down store. Along Jot Em Down Road, there was a real country store, where Forsyth farmers would come and listen to the show, and in time, the real store became known by the fictional names.

“In what became the Jot Em Down store, the owner had a radio. It’s got to be the early ‘30s, he had the first one in the area. Nobody else had one in their homes, so the farmers would always try to manage to not be busy about the time that ‘Lum and Abner’ came on and would go to the old country store and listen,” Clark said.

The names of both the real and fictitious stores come from the practice of owners “jotting down” the items bought by farmers before they could pay it back after the harvest. 

Jot Em Down is in the Chestatee area, a Creek Indian word kept by both the Cherokee and settlers that means “firelight” or “torchlight,” which Clark said could reference hunting or the Chattahoochee River.

Ducktown

Another animal-named area is Ducktown in west Forsyth.

Compared to some names, this one came along later, in the 1930s.

“Sometimes it is what it seems,” Clark said. “There was a fella, a duck farmer. He had flocks of ducks and that type of thing. The thing about the ducks is I guess they were really friendly because they were used to being fed. So anyone new in town, they’d just start following them around town waiting to get fed.”

Coal Mountain

Clark joked that Coal Mountain is 0-for-2 in names since there is no coal and no mountain.

Instead, he said the origin of the name was a “real estate lie” from a settler whose family lived in coal country.

“She wrote letters back to her family and said, ‘You’ve got to come down here, this is great. There are jobs down here. We’re living on Coal Mountain,’” Clark said.

Clark said the name moved across town and was previously near Hammonds Crossing.

Cuba

One of the most recognizable looks into old Forsyth is on a Coca-Cola sign in front of an old store on Friendship Circle with the words “Mrs. Roy Redd Cuba, Ga.”

Clark said locals didn’t pronounce the name the same way as the country and instead called it “Cubey.” The name came from a popular card game played at the store.

Vickery/Wild Cat Creek

While many places in the county were named for who lived there, some got their names after stories and events, like Vickery Creek.

In the early days of the county, Charlotte Vickery was doing laundry at the creek when she saw a wildcat stalking her infant child.

“She immediately jumped between the wildcat and the baby and caught the brunt of the wildcat, which if you know anything about wildcats, pound-for-pound they can hold their own,” Clark said. “She basically got ahold of its neck and strangled it while it was ripping her to shreds. From that day forward, (the creek) became known as Wildcat.”

Others

Clark said he wouldn’t be able to answer how every place got its name but pointed out names like the Drew and Matt communities were named after people, possibly postmasters, and many of the county’s roads are named for a family, individual or business.

“I live on Doc Bramblett, and north of me is Dr. Bramblett’s house,” Clark said. “Pirkle Ferry is the road that lead’s you to Pirkle’s Ferry. There’s a lot of names I’m not going to get into but if you discover who they are, then you learned some history.”