Wednesday 16th September 2009 - A Day in Court

Rockbridge County Courthouse in Lexington is a new building with a parking lot underneath it. So when the man with the gun wouldn't let me take my Swiss army knife in, I only had to go back downstairs to stow it. This was after another leisurely breakfast swopping photographs. One of the Lexington coffee shops actually has live old-time music at breakfast time, with the players gradually vanishing, dressed for the office.
Wandering through old records is fascinating, and I can do it for hours. Of course I can hardly see afterwards, so I try to be disciplined and limit the time I spend. Anyway, I want to go round the music shop and mooch for a bit when I've finished.
The clerks who copied out court records back in the 1800s did not always have quite the quality of handwriting one might expect. Previous searchs have left me unable to decypher significant words. Usually seals are rendered just as a set of squiggles. But the clerk here relieved his boredom by making an attempt to draw the corporate seals on the original documents. And the documents carrying the seal of the Rockbridge Company produced a surprise: it carried the motto "Let Glasgow Flourish", which has been the motto on the coat-of-arms of Glasgow, Scotland for 400 years.

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So this place wasn't just named for a local family, it adopted the original brand as well.
Even more, the street names they chose included "St Vincent Street", "Argyle Street", and "Clyde Place". I formed the adventurous view (I confess this was later that night) that someone knew the names of the streets in the centre of Glasgow, and they chose all the ones which weren't royalist or imperialist. If you look at a map of the centre of Glasgow, that leaves very few. I explained the absence of Sauchiehall Street by an inability to spell it. And, of course, if they had known all of Nelson's victories, they might have excluded St Vincent as well. But their map also calls one of the pools in the James River "Loch Lomond", and one of the parks "Kelvin Grove". The only one in present-day Glasgow VA is Kelvin Grove, which survives as a street name.
So I think it is reasonable to claim that this place was named, at least partly, after Glasgow in Scotland. Although the deed selling the land is signed by Mrs Johns as "Elizabeth Glasgow Johns".

Later that night, as well as inventing part of an early meeting of the Rockbridge Company, we had a long dicussion on the multi-dialect etymology of "redneck" and "white-van-man". Of course, we reached no conclussions: that would just spoil things.