Finger Lakes TImes Monday, March 24, 2003 What’s in a (ROAD) name? Some area road names are cloaked in legend; others are simply descriptive By MATT REYNOLDS Times Staff Writer PALMYRA — Barbara Keyser has a method for getting rid of telemarketers. When they ask for her address, she puts on her thickest Southern accent and answers, “Why that’d be 4769 Hogback Hill Road. “After that, they usually hang up,” she says. “Which is odd, because what telemarketer just hangs up?” Such is the mystique of Palmyra’s Hogback Hill Road, a three-mile country way with a motorcycle racing track, two hills, 35 homes, no visible hogs, and a reputation for being a poor and spooky backwoods. “Many people, not just telemarketers, make all kinds of assumptions when they hear the address,” Keyser said. “Basically, they think we’re all hicks out here.” Historians say the majority of area roads bear the names of families who once lived on them. But Wayne and other local counties are strewn with bizarre and quaint exceptions. Names like Chicken Coop Road in Covert, Bear Swamp Road in Williamson, and Mt. Pleasant Road in Lyons. Most have a story behind them, stories that don’t always mesh with the way life on the roads has turned out. “It always raises an eyebrow when I give my address,” said Benjamin Pitcher, 75, of 1072 Whiskey Hill Road, Waterloo. Not much booze flows these days on Whiskey Hill, home mostly to farmers, retirees and at least two Amish families, but legend has it a saloon once stood where the road meets Route 318. Another version of the story has it that farmers who lived along it used to distill whiskey from wheat and corn, and ship it by wagon to the canal. “Apparently they got a better price by turning their crops into alcohol,” said Pitcher. “Also it was probably safer to drink whiskey back then than water.” Keyser, 50; and her husband, Ted, 59; have spent 18 years living “high on the ‘Hog.’” Their ranch home has a satellite Internet connection, an in-ground swimming pool, geothermal heating system and manicured grounds. This Hogback is geological slang for a sharp ridge with steeply sloping sides. Their road is intersected by two such ridges, which look like mini-drumlins from a distance. Similar topography also explains the names of the Hogback roads in the towns of Butler and Savannah. Stoney Lonesome Road, in Williamson, formerly called Delass Road, was named because it is stony — literally ridden with stones — and lonesome, five miles from the hamlet of Williamson and sparsely settled. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that four farmers’ daughters welded those two traits into one name. “They traveled everyday to school in Williamson,” said town historian Chester Peters. “When people asked them where they were from, they said the stoney, lonesome road.” An alternate version of the story includes a young, solitary girl walking one night to a relative’s home in Pultneyville. The road then was little more than a dirt path through the woods, and to find her way home, she dropped stones as she went along. Not far from Stoney Lonesome Road is Bear Swamp Road, which crosses former swampland that was drained, divided into parcels and is today mostly used for farming. Peters said he supposes bear used to roam near it. He had no explanation for Owls Nest Road in East Williamson. Mt. Pleasant Road in Lyons, as the name suggests, crests a hill with a pleasant view. Fink Road, also in Lyons, was named after a family of outhouse cleaners who moonlighted hauling away the carcasses of dead animals. One of the region’s better-known gaffes (or acts of graft) has to do with the pre-emption roads. After the Revolutionary War, New York and Massachusetts, both of whose royal charters granted land rights west to the Pacific Ocean, settled a dispute over what is today Western New York by drawing a line from the Pennsylvania line northward to Lake Ontario. Col. Hugh Maxwell was hired in 1788 to mark that line with a road. It should have run from the center of Seneca Lake north to Lake Ontario, but by the time he got to Geneva, he was at least two miles off. Three years later, New York and Massachusetts built a second Pre-Emption Road, which has since become Pre-Emption Street in Geneva and Townline Road in Phelps. “There are many theories about what went wrong for Maxwell,” said John Marks, curator at the Geneva Historical Society. “He either didn’t compensate for magnetic north, was constantly drunk on rum and whiskey, or was paid by someone to make the mistake.” Perhaps the Finger Lakes’ most literal name belongs to a ghost road few people even know about, according to Savannah historian John Spellman. In the mid-1930s, laborers from the federal Works Progress Administration showed up to build a road and bridge across Crusoe Lake in Savannah. The lake is two feet of open water floating atop a bog about a mile long and some 900 feet across. Workers arrived in the summer, and by fall, had built the bridge across two-thirds of the lake, when one morning, they showed up to find everything was gone. Literally everything — not just small items like their gloves, shovels and pails. Dump trucks, steam shovels and most importantly, the road itself, had vanished. After much confusion, it was determined that the road and tools had sunk into the bog during the night. The project was abandoned and today only a faint impression of a carpath survives from Cotton Road to the lake’s edge — known locally as Submarine Road.