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Gristmill: Bring Back Noyack

Thu, 07/18/2024 - 10:16
An old postcard showing the future Whalebone General Store in the Southampton Town hamlet of Noyack (now Noyac).

Noyac. If you stop and ponder it, you realize something’s off. There’s something odd about the look of it, an air of the Franco-American, perhaps — Cadillac, Kerouac, bivouac, hemophiliac. (Wait, maybe not that last one.) 

The “Noyack” spelling, though, has a certain muscularity. A clarity, with that appended K. There’s no doubt about what you’re looking at: a tribute — late and inadequate, but still — to the peaceable native people who fished, clammed, enjoyed the abundant shoreline, and generally minded their own damn business. We know how that went. 

Now, attentive drivers will have noticed “Noyack Road,” tall, proud, and highly legible, on a bright-green new street sign at the Deerfield Road intersection — part of a repaving and drainage redo that, for a change, flat works. 

But the sign maker’s corrective measure goes beyond looking good; it’s historically accurate. 

Consider that mild-mannered Bob Keene, bookseller and Bridgehamptoner, for nearly 20 years the Southampton Town historian, seemed fed up in 1990 when he wrote, yes, a strongly worded letter to The Sag Harbor Express to set the record straight once and for all, citing William Wallace Tooker’s 1910 book “Indian Place Names” to point out that Noyack derives from the Algonquin word for “a point of or corner of land.” (In a stab at consistency, he spells it “Algonkin.”)

“Mention was made of Noyack in the earliest Town Records,” Keene emphasizes. A 1696 sale of six acres by John Parker to one Theophilus Willman, for instance. Fast-forward to the 1857 Coast and Geodetic Survey chart for the South Shore (ditto: Noyack), and onward, he writes, to the 1916 E. Belcher Hyde Atlas of Suffolk County, where it is “again spelled with the ‘k.’ ” 

Indeed, “rarely has there been as much evidence to back up the spelling of a place name as there is for Noyack,” a spelling, he concludes, that “has been accepted by the Town for the past 350 years!”

So, why wimpy “Noyac”? In his letter, Keene pointedly wonders why “newspapers and their correspondents” insist on it. 

And there you have it. The media. Those perpetual cellar-dwellers in the public esteem, right down there with dentists and lobbyists; everything from NAFTA to Trump’s ear gets laid at their feet. 

It’s never too late to snatch back some dignity. Starting with the emphatic K at the end of Noyack.  

 

 

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