Chemical & Engineering News Digital Edition - January 18, 2010

newscripts
While navigating his way through
Kentucky a few years back,
Nicholas C. Thomas was surprised
to fi nd two noble gases on his road
atlas. The eastern region of the Bluegrass
State is home to the villages of Krypton
and Neon, about 50 miles apart. Thomas, a
chemistry professor at Auburn University,
in Montgomery, Ala., wondered what other
ELEMENTALLY NAMED HAMLETS might
be scattered about. “I guess I’ve always been
interested in fi nding examples of chemistry
in unusual places,” he tells Newscripts.
By plugging the elements into the
database of the U.S. Board on Geographic
Names’ website (geonames.usgs.gov),
Thomas was able to fi nd a wealth of towns
named for various elements. “Gold,” for example,
appears in the name of some 2,000
locations throughout the country.
Thomas published a sampling of the
elemental towns he discovered, along with
their histories, in the Journal of Chemical
Education ( 2009, 86, 181). “Understanding
the origin behind the naming of these
towns provides students with an interesting
way to connect chemistry with U.S. history
and geography,” he notes.
Travelers to Bryce Canyon National Park
might consider taking a 40-mile detour
north to Antimony, Utah. Although it’s now
a quiet ranching and vacation community,
Antimony was once home to Butch Cassidy.
The town was originally named Coyote
when it was settled by cattle ranchers, but
the discovery of stibnite—Sb 2 S 3 —
eventually led
to an antimonymining
operation
and a new name.
Barium
Springs, N.C.,
was once known
as Poison Springs
because cattle refused
to drink from
the local mineral
pools. That old name might have
come as a shock to customers
of a company known as the
Great Human Repair Shop,
which sold the local waters
as a health tonic throughout
the country and overseas until
the end of World War I.
With a nod toward the
alchemical, Lead, S.D., is home to
the Homestake mine, which was the
largest, deepest, and most productive
RANDY SMITH
OUR TOWN IS ELEMENTAL
THEODORE GRAY
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 40 JANUARY 18, 2010
gold mine in the Western Hemisphere until
it was shuttered in 2001. Thomas notes
that you’ll have to suppress your chemical
instincts if you want to fi t in with the locals,
whose pronunciation of the town’s name
rhymes with “seed.”
Blink and you might miss the 1.2-acre
patch of the Show-Me State known as
Lithium. There’s still a sign to indicate the
tiny, now uninhabited Missouri town.
Many of the towns listed in Thomas’
paper derive their names from local mineral
deposits, but the town of Calcium, N.Y.,
is an exception. As it turns out, Thomas
had to be something of a sleuth to learn
how this hamlet of 3,000 residents got its
name. Very little information about Calcium
is readily available, he tells Newscripts. It
was only when he placed a cold call to the
Calcium Community Church that Thomas
was able to learn the history of the town’s
name from the local pastor.
In the early 1900s, a local resident
named Madison Cooper successfully petitioned
to have the town’s name changed
from Sanford’s Corner. It was a somewhat
extreme move born out of the frustration of
having his mail frequently sent by mistake
to Stanfordville, N.Y. Cooper worked in cold
storage and refrigeration and chose to
name his hometown for the calcium chloride
used in his trade. Also on the plus side
regarding his postal problems: No other
town in the country was named Calcium.
In the course of his investigation,
Thomas got to thinking
Elementville: Boron, Calif.; Carbon,
Ill.; and Sulphur, La.
that it might be fun to take an
elemental road trip—in his
Chevy Cobalt, of course. The
idea, however, was quickly shot
down by his wife.
BETHANY HALFORD wrote this week’s
column. Please send comments and
suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.
MICHAEL HUNTER