Honorific Naming

Honorific naming, also called honor naming or anthroponymic commemoration, refers to the practice of recognizing individuals and the values they represent by using their names to refer to inanimate objects, abstractions, processes, and phenomena. The term “eponym” refers to the person after whom the feature, place, or object was named. Honor names have been applied to such diverse things as natural features, chemical elements, diseases, beer and wine, weather events, mathematical equations, ships, and theories. While street names are the most common type of anthroponymic commemoration in the United States, on college campuses, building names figure largely.

Onomastics is the study of names and naming, and in the United States, the American Name Society, formed in 1951, leads the field in promoting dialogue about honorific naming, largely through the journal NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics. The American Name Society provides helpful definitions for understanding different types of naming, including those important to understanding honorific naming at NC State:

Anthroponym: proper name for a person or group of people. Sub-areas include the study of names used to label ethno racial groups, nationalities, tribes, families, individuals, etc.

Hodonym: a proper name given to routes such as the names of crossings, bridges, pathways, roads, streets, tunnels, etc.

Hydronym: a proper name used to label a body of standing or moving water such as a brook, pond, lake, ocean, river, sea, spring, strait, swamp, water fall, watering hole, well, etc.

Toponym: a proper name assigned to a place, either with or without inhabitants. ...also be referred to as a “place name”.

As geographers, historians, etymologists, and others have shown, naming and renaming reflect not just an honor bestowed, but larger processes of power, politics, economics, and culture. Honorific names have been extended and retracted throughout history, sometimes with little attention and sometimes with significant controversy. According to geographer Mark Monmonier’s title to his classic work on cartography, maps have the power to  “name, claim, and inflame.”

Honor namings have a long history in western societies as accolades for accomplishments as well as devices for negotiating power, and the earliest known examples are from science. Writing on pages 223-4 in Nuncius, historian of science Marco Beretta concluded “the systematic use of eponyms has resulted in one of the most effective reward systems in Western science,” tracing its use to Classical Antiquity. He notes that Plato referred to distinctive teaching styles as “Pythagorean” after Pythagoras, who would later be known for his method of finding the hypotenuse of a triangle; Beretta speculates that the Hippocratic Oath may be the oldest eponym in the modern era. Historians of science cite the Renaissance as a time when powerful men honored one another in science, cartography, exploration, and the funding of such endeavors. Writing in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, historian of science Jonathan Sawday makes the connection between honor naming in cartography as a practice of colonization and new knowledge about anatomy increasing medical authority. He shows that European map makers sought to rename geography to appropriate Native property and stake claims among imperial powers as doctors sought to map the human body as an exercise of authority over it.

The political roots of honor naming informed the practice as it developed with more complex rituals in recent history. Maritime historian Jan Rüger in his study of the British “cult of the Navy” showed how the ceremonies to name ships became more elaborate as Britons sought to build an identity based on naval prowess; on pages 160-1, he writes these “professionally stage-managed rituals...play[ed] to national and international audiences. This was a theatre of identities as it was one of power and might.” By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colleges and universities commonly used eponyms and hosted rituals to dedicate buildings and streets to particular individuals.

Like ship names, building and street names were often steeped in power and politics, and renamings became as common as namings. Such is the case of rue Alexis Carrel in Paris, which, according to physician Marc E. Weksler writing in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine was named for Nobel prizewinning physician Alexis Carrel in 1974 but renamed in 2002 when Parisians objected to the honor of a physician who promoted eugenics and racial “purity.” They renamed the street after Jean Pierre-Bloch, who resisted Nazi occupation of France and worked against anti-semitism and racism.

The first two honor names at NC State appear to be Primrose Hall and Watauga Hall. Both names occur in the 1896-1897 North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, Eighth Annual Catalogue with their present names, and the catalogues include explanations of the names. An 1897 map of the university labels both Primrose and Watauga, while other buildings have more generic names like “Main Building,” “2nd Dormitory” or “Boiler House.” The university named Primrose Hall after business leader and Watauga Club member William S. Primrose, who served on the Board of Trustees for twenty years. Watauga was named for the club that organized to lobby for an agricultural and mechanical college in North Carolina, efforts that eventually resulted in the founding of the university. In naming buildings for Primrose and fellow Wataugans, the university declared its support for their work and values.

Throughout its history and like many institutions, the university named and renamed buildings after financial supporters, alumni, professors, administrators, and others who typically reflected the values of the university community at the time. Dedication ceremonies and plaques on the buildings reveal the reasons trustees, administrators, faculty, and students identified individuals for the honor of a courtyard, building, or street name. The ritual of a dedication, an event organized to officially bestow the honorific, could include speeches, prayers, songs, and unveilings to connect the named individuals and their accomplishments to the use of the building. University buildings are named for donors, professors, chancellors, alumni, corporations, politicians, and even a school of forestry (Biltmore Hall, named after the Biltmore Forest School, the first school of forestry in the US and Canada). Of all the buildings on campus, two are named for African Americans: Witherspoon Student Center after Augustus M. Witherspoon, noted botanist and second African American to earn a PhD at NC State, and Holmes Hall, dedicated in 2018 to Irwin Holmes, one of four African Americans to integrate NC State undergraduate education in the 1950s. Holmes was an engineering student and captain of the tennis team. Three buildings are named after women. Carroll Hall, dedicated to nurse Susan Colwell Carroll (1849-1901) in 1969, honored the first “matron” of the college infirmary. Gertrude Cox, statistician and founder of the Department of Experimental Statistics, was honored with Cox Hall, dedicated to her in 1970. The Marye Anne Fox Science Teaching Laboratory bears the name of NC State’s first woman chancellor, who led the university from 1998-2004. One street, Katharine Stinson Drive, and one courtyard, Mary Yarborough Court are named after women.

Recently, campus discussions around honor names centered on buildings named after individuals whose writings reflect white supremacist ideology. Through letters, features in student newspapers, and petitions, students objected to the names Poe Hall, Daniels Hall, Tompkins Hall, Clark Labs, and D. H. Hill Jr. Library. NC State campus discussions on building names reflect a larger dialogue about the historic role of universities in constructing and perpetuating white supremacy and colonization worldwide from universities in Accra, Ghana to Taipei, Taiwan, from Oxford, UK to Eugene, Oregon. Opponents of renaming buildings worry about “erasing history,” but historians distinguish between memory practices such as memorialization and commemoration, and history, the systematic analysis of the past based on primary sources such as letters, organizational documents, and other materials. In 2017, the American Historical Association issued its Statement on Confederate Monuments, which clarified the distinction between history and memory:

History comprises both facts and interpretations of those facts. To remove a monument, or to change the name of a school or street, is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history. A monument is not history itself; a monument commemorates an aspect of history, representing a moment in the past when a public or private decision defined who would be honored in a community’s public spaces.

In Fall of 2020, following the Black Lives Matter marches responding to the most recent wave of police killings of Black men and women, the Daniels family agreed to the removal of a statue honoring Josephus Daniels, a powerful proponent of white supremacy, from a park in Raleigh. Shortly thereafter, NC State announced that Daniels Hall will no longer bear the name. In September of 2020, the Board of Trustees clarified university policy on building names, providing more solutions for dealing with eponyms that no longer reflect university values.

Journal

Names: A Journal of Onomastics (American Name Society)

Original Source References

Box 10 (Building Dedications), North Carolina State University, University Archives Reference Collection, University Buildings, Sites, Landmarks Files, UA 050.004, NC State University Libraries Special Collections Research Center

“Birds-eye view of A&M College, 1897.”Office of the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Records (UA003.001), Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries

North Carolina State University. Undergraduate catalog (LD3928 .A22), Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries

Secondary Source References

American Historical Association, “Statement on Confederate Monuments 2017.” https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-confederate-monuments

American Name Society. “About Onomastics.” https://www.americannamesociety.org/names/

Beretta, Marco. “Names as Rewards: The Ambiguous Role of Eponyms in the History of Science.” Nuncius 34 (2019), 219-235.

Berry, Hardy D. Place Names on the Campus of North Carolina State University. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University, 1995

“Daniels Hall to be renamed, NC State Board of Trustees Evaluate University Naming Policy.” The Technician. June 22, 2020. http://www.technicianonline.com/news/article_5018fc64-b4a9-11ea-ac8f-0349602ed577.html

Gonzalez, Jackie. “OP-ED: Dixie.” The Technician. October 31, 2017. http://www.technicianonline.com/opinion/article_e30f8b3a-be9a-11e7-88cb-27b9643c2cd3.html.

Hallen, J. “OP-ED: Acknowledging Our Racist History: The Naming of Daniels Hall.” The Technician, November 9, 2017. http://www.technicianonline.com/opinion/article_37ed03c8-c4fc-11e7-8dfc-432b5406e47a.html.

Monmonier, Mark S. From S***w Tit to Whorehouse Meadow : How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2006.

NC State University, “POL 03.00.02 – Criteria and Procedures for Naming Facilities, Programs and Funds.” https://policies.ncsu.edu/policy/pol-03-00-02/

Phelps, Christopher. “Removing Racist Symbols Isn’t a Denial of History”. Of “Confronting History on Campus”. Focus: The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 2016), 12-15.

Quillen, Martha. “Statue of Josephus Daniels, Publisher and White Supremacist, Removed from Raleigh Square.” Raleigh News and Observer June 16, 2020 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article243559272.html

Rüger, Jan. “Nation, Empire, and Navy: Identity Politics in the United Kingdom 1187-1914.” Past and Present 185 (November 2004), 159-187.

Sawday, Jonathan. “‘They Shall No More Be Remembered by Their Name’: Cartography, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Eponym.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48: 1 (January 2018), 11-40.

unsigned. “EDITORIAL: NC State Facility Names Must Reflect Inclusive Values.” The Technician, October 7, 2018, sec. 

Op-Ed. http://www.technicianonline.com/opinion/article_325dd7fe-ca8f-11e8-be46-33108a12426f.html.

Weksler, Marc E. “Naming Streets for Physicians: ‘L’affaire Carrel’.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 47, 1 (Winter 2004) 67-73