From Purgatory to Hell: America's oddest town names

It's a long way from Scratch Ankle, Ala., to Good Grief, Idaho; from Stinking Point, Va., to Yum Yum, Tenn.; from Dynamite, Wash., to Tranquility, Calif.

But stopping to take pictures along the way, writer Gary Gladstone reports that meeting the people who lived there put the fun back into his flagging career as a freelance photographer. The result is "Passing Gas: And Other Towns Along the American Highway" (Ten Speed Press, $19.95), so named because people who drive through Gas, Kan., are told not to blink or they'll pass Gas.

In getting glimpses of who lives in Purgatory, Maine, or Tightwad, Mo., Gladstone comes up with Nothing, Ariz., or Zero, Mont., in trying to find out how some of these towns got their names. That's nothing to Panic, Pa., about.

But there's something reassuring about towns so small that people 10 miles away have never heard of them, or where an elderly woman agrees to get her photo taken because "Velma at the County says that you're OK."

Gladstone writes that he started his 38,000-mile journey over 40 states expecting to find cartoon characters, but instead found real people. Some a little odd, a few surly, but most happy to share all they know about their strangely named little towns.

"Oh, boy. You've just made my year!" bare-footed Chris McKinley says as he poses atop his pickup truck in Scratch Ankle, Ala., named when church people passing by in their carriages noted that scratching mosquito bites was the prime pastime of people on porches.

In Intercourse, Ala., named for the crossroads where the general store sits, Gladstone heard that after a series of car crashes outside the town's meeting hall, the local sewing instruction group was asked to take down its sign, "Intercourse Lessons Wednesday Night."

He did not learn the origin of the names of Rough and Ready and Fearnot, neighboring towns in Pennsylvania, but he did hear about a newspaper headline from the 1930s: "Fearnot Man Marries Rough and Ready Woman."

Another headline, this time from Nice, Calif., made Jay Leno's headline segment on "The Tonight Show": "Nice man arrested for beating wife."

The origin of the name Suck-Egg Hollow in Tennessee was not so nice. A local egg farmer shot every animal that came near his henhouse until he discovered black snakes were sucking down his eggs. Meanwhile, Toad Suck, Ark., was named for ferry boat captains who sucked down moonshine whisky in between runs until they "swole up like toads."

Towns were named for prominent people — Dull (Ohio); Nuttsville (Virginia) — and for the parting words of prominent people whose names were spurned (In Michigan: "You can call this place Hell for all I care").

Civil War soldiers left the legacy of Sweetlips, Tenn., when they stopped for a drink at the stream, and for Stinking Point, Va., when their bodies washed up on shore.

Peculiar, Mo., could have been called Exasperation. After turning down a mail district three times for picking names that were already chosen, officials sent a message saying that they didn't care what it was called as long as it was peculiar, meaning unique.

In the five years of intermittently traveling these back roads, Gladstone learned to call ahead to find someone willing to talk and pose for the photos, which sometimes are directly related to the town name — as in Fleatown, Ohio, where the dog posing with his owners just by chance started to scratch — but more often not.

Gladstone has shot photos for Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. He describes himself as a fast-talking New Yorker, which sometimes earned him a frosty reception on the phone. But in person he was no match for the slow-talking country folks:

"We say hello and that's the last word we get in," he writes about one stop.

Of course, he couldn't find any bumpkins in Washington state, but he did find scenery, and Gladstone writes that the Pacific Northwest "is as beautiful as advertised, and then some." He stopped in Dynamite, north of Spokane, where he followed a rancher on horseback to an old stone storage shed once used by explosives-handling Chinese laborers.

And he went to Stuck, northeast of Tacoma, where scrapyard owner John David Sanderson told him the place was named for partying kids whose cars got stuck in the loose gravel near what was the Stuck River, now a short channel of the White River.

Over nine trips in five years, Gladstone shot 21,000 frames of film, finding his way to Ding Dong, Surprise, Goofy Ridge and Monkey's Eyebrow with 65 pounds of maps and atlases. Plus, he had the pinpoint instruction of locals who treated him like a neighbor:

"Turn left up where the church used to be."

Sherry Stripling: sstripling@seattletimes.com