A television crew from Boise drove up here in 2020 to ask the question everybody eventually asks, which is how a town of seven hundred people ended up named Athol. You can watch the segment on KTVB’s channel. It runs two and a half minutes and the anchor cannot get through it with a straight face, which is fair. He is not the first.
What I want to talk about is underneath the jokes. This town had a clean shot at a different name and turned it down.
The duke, and the trouble with the duke
The story the segment lands on is the one you will hear at the counter in town: the name comes from a Scottish duke who visited. It is a good story. A duke. Out here, in the jack pine.
The city does not tell it that way. Pull up the history page on the city’s own website and the chain runs through Massachusetts. The settlement here was first known as Colton. It got renamed Athol by a settler who came from Athol, Massachusetts, and that Massachusetts town took its name from a district in Scotland associated with the Duke of Atholl.
So the duke is in there. He is three steps back and four thousand miles away, and there is no good reason to think he ever stood in this valley. To the city’s credit, its history page says plainly that nobody knows whether the name arrived with a descendant of that family or simply rode west in somebody’s memory.
Which is a pity, because the real duke is a better character than the legend needs. The title was created in 1703, it belongs to the head of Clan Murray, and the holder keeps the Atholl Highlanders, the only legal private army in Europe. Queen Victoria granted that after a visit in 1844. A man with a private army almost certainly never came to Athol, Idaho. You can see why we would want him to.
Now look at the neighbors
Here is what gets lost when Athol is the punchline. Around here, Athol is the normal one.
Drive twenty minutes south and you are in Coeur d’Alene, which is French for heart of an awl. An awl is the spike you punch holes in leather with. French speaking fur traders hung that name on the Schitsu’umsh people, and the going explanation is that it was a backhanded compliment about how hard they bargained. Sharp. Pointed. In the old fur company ledgers it comes through as Pointed Hearts. The Schitsu’umsh have their own name for themselves, and it means roughly the people who were found here. The city on the lake is named after a trader’s complaint about losing a negotiation.
Go north instead and you reach Lake Pend Oreille, French for hangs from the ear. Traders named the Kalispel that for the shell ornaments they wore. The Kalispel call themselves Ql̓ispé, the camas people, after the bulb they lived on. So the biggest lake in Idaho is named after somebody’s earrings.
Two nations, named by visitors, after a tool and a piece of jewelry, and both names stuck to the water and the map.
And then there is Idaho
If you want the good one, it is the word on the license plate.
A lobbyist named George Willing carried the name Idaho into Congress around 1860 for a new territory out by Pike’s Peak and told them it was a Shoshone word meaning gem of the mountains. Congress liked it. Congress was moments from stamping it when word got around that it was not a Shoshone word at all, and possibly not any word, and that Willing had made it up. So they named that territory Colorado instead.
Idaho should have died right there. It did not. People had already started saying it. It went on a steamboat, then a Colorado town, then a county, and when gold came out of the Clearwater the workings got called the Idaho diggings, and by 1863 there was an Idaho Territory whether anybody liked it or not. Historians later went hunting for a Nez Perce or Shoshoni or Arapaho word that sounded like it and came back empty handed, which is what happens when you go looking for a word that was never there.
Then comes one more turn, and it is my favorite. The hoax story itself is not airtight. Willing’s claim only shows up in print in 1875, fifteen years after the word first appears, and that steamboat launched in 1860 as well, so nobody can say for certain whether he coined it or just took the credit later. Our state is named after a word that is probably invented, by a man who may or may not have invented it.
A state with a made up name. A lake named for earrings. A city named for a leather punch. And a little town on Highway 54 that everybody snickers at.
The part I actually admire
Athol had an out.
At one point the town floated renaming itself Silver City, after the amusement park down the highway. Clean, marketable, no jokes. It did not take. People here had grown used to the name and grown used to the ribbing, and they stayed Athol. The fellow the news crew interviewed said the jokes just roll off him, and that most everybody in town is the same way.
That tells you something about a place. A town that gets handed an easier name and says no thanks knows exactly what it is.
Why I am bothering with any of this
Because we ask you to believe our numbers.
We publish acreages to three decimals and the water main to the foot, and we tell you which sheet of the approved plans every figure came off. That habit does not get to switch off when the subject changes from culverts to dukes. If I will correct our own published figure on the water main, and I have had to, then I will also set down the pleasant local legend when the city’s own historians are standing right there saying they do not know.
Nobody knows for sure, and the city says so. That is the most trustworthy sentence in the whole story.
The businesses in town, the ones still open and the ones we have checked ourselves, are on the town page.