Strangely named places in Sonoma County: What’s an Elnoka, anyway?

Letters to editors protesting the Elnoka development on Sonoma Highway are mounting into a fair-sized stack of outrage for multiple reasons — it’s too big, it’s in a fire zone or, most common, it’s off a two-lane highway forming a large portion of the route to reach Interstate 80. If there is anyone out there in favor of this project, apart from the developer, they haven’t been heard from. Maybe stuck in Highway 12 traffic?

The dozen or so letters in the past two months about the 600-plus homes proposed at the 68-acre site, at a sign saying Elnoka Lane, all protest such density on a busy highway. Some, incidentally, are asking: What does Elnoka mean?

It’s a question raised by residents who do not have “a history” in that area — who may not even know, for example, that the land in question adjoins an intersection once known as Lawson’s Corners, one of many “Corners” on early maps where country roads crossed in the early days of the automobile. “Corners” generally had a store and a service station. Sometimes a saloon.

But I digress — and the digression comes with a warning that there will be more of them as we go along, as we venture into Wonderland, talking about Elnoka and words of that kind.

...

SO, WHAT the heck IS an Elnoka? Suggestions have been made, including one questioning whether it is a Japanese term, because the land in question was bought and cleared in the 1980s by a Japanese development company that left without development. But it isn’t Japanese and it isn’t spelled correctly. Like neighboring Melita, which requires another t to be the town in Italy it was named for, Elnoka needs two more capital letters.

For decades in the middle of the 20th century ElNoKa was a sweet little plant nursery that flourished on that property — at the dead end of the lane of the same name, just north of that “new” sign. It was owned by Hossein Tomlinson and his wife, Loretta, and their three daughters, Elizabeth, Norma and Karen.

Thus, the Aha! moment arrives! The first two letters of each of those daughters makes ElNoKa, a classic portmanteau name that is better than most because it is pronounceable. It rolls off the tongue more easily, in fact, than that word ”portmanteau,” a term coined by Lewis Carroll for Humpty Dumpty to explain use of the term “slithy.” “It’s like a portmanteau,” Humpty tells Alice, “… two meanings packed up into one word.”

(Portmanteau has become relatively common since Alice went down the hole – at least among academics. It may, however, require explanation. Centuries past, “portmanteau” was the French name for a piece of hinged luggage with two separate compartments — two in one. Humpty‘s explanation to Alice was the first one of many ways that this borrowed word expanded the English language.)

But I digress. Again. I’m very good at digression.

ElNoKa is not the only word puzzle in our county. Let’s talk about a couple of others, just because the names of things seem important enough to warrant not only our attention but also a word of their own. Toponymy. You can look it up. Britannica will tell you it is a “taxonomic study of place-names.” (You’ll have to look up “taxonomic” yourself.)

...

THERE IS a classic work of American toponymy called “Names on the Land,” written in the 1940s by Professor George R. Stewart, who may have been the most famous member of Cal’s English Department in the mid-20th century. He not only taught, but he was a working author with a heap of successes, including a sci-fi story that still sells well called “Earth Abides” and a history of the Donner Party, “Ordeal by Hunger,” considered the best account of that Gold Rush-era disaster.

The fact that Stewart’s “Names on the Land” is still in print 75 years after publication says that there still are people who like to ponder how things got strange names — such as Elnoka. There are plenty of puzzlers out there.

...

SOMETIMES IT’S just history, nothing more — some more ancient than others.

The pending merger of Analy and El Molino high schools has been a headline for much of the past year. El Molino is no puzzle at all. It is Spanish for “the mill,” and there was one, the first water-powered mill in the county on a land grant owned, as so many in California were, by an American sea captain, John Cooper, who sailed in and out of Monterey and happened to be the brother-in-law of Gen. Mariano Vallejo, who had a lot to say about who got grants. Many of Sonoma County’s two dozen grantees were “family” to either Mariano or his wife, Benicia. And many of those land grant names are scattered across our county map.

But the origin of Analy is a whole story unto itself. It comes from ancient Ireland, spelling altered along the way to early Sonoma County, arriving in the baggage of one of the most important early settlers to this area, a gent named Jasper O’Farrell.

Arthur Dawson, the Glen Ellen ecological historian (maybe we can call him a toponymist as well?), told all about Analy half a dozen years ago in a Press Democrat column.

Dawson begins his tale in 1014 with Viking invaders being repelled by an Irish king who was rewarded with an unpronounceable Gaelic name meaning noble warrior, that became, through centuries of change, O’Farrell.

For the next half-century O’Farrells ruled a region called Anghaile in Gaelic, Annaly in English. But when a series of invasions by Henry VIII — famously Protestant — set off the conflict for the ages between devout Irish Catholics and the English, the O’Farrells left their ancestral home.

In the 1840s, at the age of 26, a Dublin-trained civil engineer named Jasper O’Farrell arrived in California and was soon employed by the Mexican government to survey land grant boundaries in what is now Sonoma County and beyond. He received payment in the form of his own grant, Rancho Nicasio in what would become Marin County. Later, after the combination of the Mexican War and the discovery of gold rushed California into statehood, O’Farrell traded Nicasio to James Black for western Sonoma County’s Jonive Rancho, which included the town of Freestone.

By 1858 he was officially a Sonoma County resident and, furthermore, one of the wealthiest, if not THE wealthiest of them all. So it was that when the county was divided into townships for judicial and other governing purposes, O’Farrell was asked to provide the name of the one that stretched east from his own ranch all the way to the Laguna and would, as towns grew, take in both Forestville and Sebastopol.

He named it Analy Township, dropping only a single letter from his ancestral Irish kingdom. Author Stewart, with his toponymic interests, would have loved that story. Actually, he might have known it.

...

THERE ARE more of those Wonderland names in the area. There is, for instance, Ilsanjo. Lake Ilsanjo is the little spring-fed lake at the top of the Spring Creek trail in Trione-Annadel Park.

Aha! There in a single sentence we have not one but two sparkling portmanteau words. Such toponymystic riches!

Ilsanjo is like Elnoka, only lesser. It is the amalgamation “Ilse and Joe,” last name Coney, the last private owners of the ranch that sprawled across the ridges from Sonoma Highway to Bennett Valley. Annadel is, like Analy, another Irishman’s creation. Samuel Hutchinson, who ran livestock and grew hops on that ranch from the mid-1800s, is said to have named it Annie’s Dale, honoring the family’s eldest daughter, Suzanna, called Annie.

When it came to the honors of names on the land, all of the above — Rincon Valley’s Tomlinsons, Ireland’s O’Farrell and rancher Sam Hutchinson — chose family.