MOUNT VERNON — History Knox readers chimed in with many interesting comments on Facebook regarding last week’s column about Lambton Square, the five-point intersection on the north side of Mount Vernon, just downhill from Mound View Cemetery, next to the old armory.
Adam Gilson, who was on the Shade Tree Commission when the park was being planned from 2009 to 2011, said that there was much discussion about the name, because historical sources conflicted.
“I never saw any source documentation that led to the decision to call it Lambton Square,” Gilson said. “But the 1877 atlas of Knox County, available for download on the county map department’s website, calls it Lamartine Square.
“This name seems the most likely to me, since the square is one block north of Lamartine Street.”
That’s an interesting possibility, but it also begs the question, how on earth did a Mount Vernon street get named for a French poet and statesman like Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)?
Since many of you know my ultra-nerdy alternate identity as a classical music critic, I’m going to throw in what I know about Lamartine:
He was the poet of the melodramatic phrase, “What is life but a series of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is tolled by Death?” which inspired composer Franz Liszt to write his famous symphonic poem Les Préludes.
He was ultimately more famous as a statesman that helped create the Second Republic in France in 1848, which is mostly why his name was in the news and on the minds of local residents naming roads as the city expanded.
It thus seems possible that the square would have been named for the French hero, just as many places in the United States are named after that other famous Frenchman of a slightly earlier period, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Gilson did add, though, that it could also just be a mistake on an old map, a possibility which reader Carrie Howe endorsed, noting that she had often seen the names of various towns misspelled on old maps.
Darcy Wyant Coggins was delighted with the possibility of a connection to Lambton in England for her own literary reasons, being a fan of Regency period fiction.
“Those in the know realize that Lambton is but five miles from Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley,” she said.
John Deever was ready to explore the connection even further and teasingly proposed to get a sample of Johnny Curtis’ DNA to compare to the current Early of Durham!
Andrea White was bursting with ideas about making the connection a reality by building a castle-type structure in the small park to serve as a recreational/artistic project for youths and a gathering place, a very exciting idea, if it could actually be brought off in such a small lot.
“By blending the need for face-to-face interaction with artistic expression and physical challenges,” White said, “Lambton Square’s castle could be a place that not only fosters creativity and community but also encourages safe, healthy, and engaging activities for tweens and adolescents.”
Jennifer McAvoy Snow and Lydia Nyhart both remarked how much they would like to see Round Hill restored and opened to the public for tours. That would be a glorious thing, if we could just find someone with deep pockets to finance the project!
Doug Givens, previously of the development office of Kenyon College and founding manager of the Philander Chase Corporation, a non-profit land preservation organization associated with the college, immediately recognized one of the names in last week’s column: Hogg, and wrote to me about it.
Henry Curtis’ wife was named Elizabeth Hogg, and Givens was struck by the coincidence that one of the English benefactors who sold 8000 acres to Kenyon founder Philander Chase, was one William Hogg (1755-1841).
Four thousand of those acres became Kenyon and its surrounding College Township after Curtis and Chase rode their horses to the site and envisioned the institution that could be.
Givens did a little digging and found some references in the Papers of the Hogg Family, 1785-1914, MSS# 208, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, which say that William Hogg came from “Cramlinton” in England.
That almost certainly has to be the town of Cramlington in Northumberland, which is interestingly only twenty miles away from Lambton Castle, which overlooked the village where Elizabeth Hogg grew up.
While William Hogg never apparently lived in central Ohio, even though he bought and sold property here, his father John did move to Licking County, and died there in 1835.
Looking in genealogical sources for John Hogg’s family, we find three sons listed with birth dates stretching over a 20-year period in northeast England.
It is very possible that there were other siblings, including Elizabeth’s father, Percival.
Other genealogical sources show Percival being born near York, slightly further away, but with his mother coming from Northumberland.
This keeps the possibility of a close family connection in the running. At this point, we have no proof, though that’s an awful lot of coincidences tracing down to two small geographical areas on opposite sides of the planet.
So our curious square name remains unresolved, though I think we’re having a lot of fun
brainstorming about the place’s roots and its potential resonances into the future.