the magic of place names

I’m returning from vacation today! Before I left, I set up some old favorites to be reposted on this blog. Since I’ve been traveling, it seemed appropriate to post something about one of my previous jaunts. This is about a bit of sympathetic magic I noticed in place names.

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When I was a child, I loved to study maps. And I still do. Tom, my anthropologist husband, shares this fascination and has collected a wide variety of them. For years, we had a map of the moon and a map of the Vienna metro thrown in the back of our car, just in case. I mean, what if you needed to locate the Sea of Tranquility? Or wanted to navigate your way around the Ringstrausse?

Growing up in (to my mind) boring, suburban New Jersey, maps offered a glimpse of an alternate world that I might visit one day, if I got lucky. Whenever I looked at a map, I would imagine what each place might be like, what their names signified. Even local place names held magic within them: Would Spring Valley be filled with flowers? What about Bellemar — how beautiful would the ocean look there?

In particular interest to me were places that shared the same names. Vienna, Virginia and Vienna, Austria. Paris, France and Paris, Texas. Jamaica, New York and . . . well, you get the idea. My favorite fantasy was that there was a sympathetic field between each of these same-named places. Words are magic, after all. If you located this power field, you would be instantly swept in a vortex of energy from one place to the next. You’d close your eyes in Venice, California and next find yourself chasing pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.

Name travel instead of time travel, as it were.

All of this is a long preamble to describe my visit last week to Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania.

Chadd’s Ford, as some of you might know, was home to the noted book illustrator N. C. Wyeth. N. C. Wyeth may now be eclipsed in fame by his son, Andrew Wyeth, but during the early part of the twentieth century, he was quite the celebrity among artists.

N. C. Wyeth was the student of Howard Pyle and inspired generations of illustrators, including myself. He was also well-paid: N. C. Wyeth used the payment he received for Treasure Island — the modern-day equivalent of $200,000 — to purchase land at Chadd’s Ford, where he built his home and studio. When you consider that most children’s book illustrators make under $10,000 for a picture book, this is an astonishing symbol of the power Wyeth’s art wielded in the marketplace.

N. C. Wyeth’s studio is only available for visits during warm weather. Though I’ve visited the Brandywine River Museum previously, it was in the winter. This time, I got lucky. The photo to the left shows the interior of his main work area. The window looks out onto his commute to work—a bucolic garden path leading up from his home, about 100 yards or so.

In my twenties, I lived for a year in a village in England named Chagford. Chagford was home to several well-known book illustrators. (I do not include myself in their illustrious company, though I hope to one day!) These artists included Alan Lee and Brian Froud. Terri Windling of the Endicott Studio for the Mythic Arts has a cottage there. In other words, Chagford is a nexus attracting book artists of all sorts — illustrators, writers, and so on. Including myself.

When I left Chagford to return to the United States after my visa expired, I felt like Eve expelled from the garden. I still dream about Chagford regularly, walking its winding streets toward the moors beyond.

Chagford, England and Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. Both homes to noted illustrators. Both attracting artists and writers.

Coincidence? Or a bit of sympathetic place name magic?

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