Lake Name Knee-Deep in Letters
Trudy Truman (AP)
It's blue waters
and sparkling shoreline have been attracting vacationers for generations,
but it's the sheer length of its name that has put Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg on the map.
The American Indian name is so long that
its decals completely cover windows and fire truck doors, and three wide
traffic lanes are needed to spell out the name at the entrance to the town
beach and boat ramp.
"We're big on T-shirts and bumper
stickers," said retired reporter Ed Patenaude.
Hundreds of tourists come to the Central
Massachusetts town of about 1,500 just to pose next to the signs. And the
name, spelled various ways since the 1600's, has inspired poems, songs and
tall tales.
The official town version has 45 letters
(though one town sign painter got carried away and added a few). That
makes it the longest lake name in the United States and one of the world's
longest place names, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Ethel Merman and Ray Bolger paid homage
to it in a song with a tom-tom beat in the 1920's. And calls come in to
Town Hall from around the world, demanding to know if it really exists and
how to spell it.
When the state Legislature tried to
eliminate a few of the double g's in 1949, outraged residents squelched
the scheme. The uproar prompted a Webster poet to write: "Should
lofty redwoods not grow taller? Lo, as I live, the g-full name shall never
grow the smaller."
Tongue-tied tourists and printers of
small maps often opt for its colorless alias: "Lake Webster."
It's not hard to pronounce when broken
down into syllables. The accents come before each slash: Char-gogg/a-gogg/man-chaugg/a-gogg/chau-bun/a-gun/ga-maugg.
The name means "the fishing place at
the boundaries and neutral meeting grounds," said Wise Owl, chief of
the Chaubunagungamaug band of Nipmucks, who were the first to fish
here. The Nipmucks and
their neighbors, the Narragansetts, Pequots and Mohegans, all gathered at
the 1,300-acre lake, still known for its bass, trout, and pike fishing.
But that’s not the
only story.
In the 1920’s, when
he was still a reporter being paid by the word at the Webster Times,
Lawrence Daly, with more imagination than facts, printed a version that
has become a better known than real story.
In Daly’s tale, the
name arose from the summit meeting of two tribes living at opposite ends
of the lake.
“They
named this beautiful lake after the terms of that treaty,” he wrote.
“Chargoggagogg, ‘You fish on your side,’ Manchauggagogg, ‘I fish
on my side,’ and Chaubunagungamaugg, ‘Nobody fish in the middle.’”
Daly, who later became
editor of the Webster Times, tried for more than 20 years to debunk his
“fanciful tale”.
“But nothing he did
made any difference,” Patenaude said. “It was completely beyond his
control.”
Most of the summer
camps that ringed the lake during its heyday as a resort in the 1920s and
‘30s have been replaced with year-round homes. The trolley is gone. And
an old dance hall is now a condominium complex.
It’s now a place of
water skiers, dock parties and, in the winter, ice boat races.
Still, the sleepy
rhythm of a summer’s day, visitors can sometimes hear an old recording
of Merman and Bolger crooning:
“Oh,
we took a walk one evening and we sat down on a log, by Lake Char-gogg-a-gogg-man-chaugg-a-gogg-chau-bun-a-gun-ga-maugg.
There, we told loves old sweet story and we listened to a frog, In Lake
Char-gogg-a-gogg-man-chaugg-a-gogg-chau-bun-a-gun-ga-maugg.”
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