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Is this a 'place of the swift water' or 'floating scum?'

By Willys Peck

Mention "anniversary" and you're talking history. Right now, we are taking note of the 50th--I like to call it half-century--anniversary of Saratoga's incorporation as a full-fledged city. That 1956 election was a key event in this community's history. But let's not stop at a mere 50 years in retrospect. Let's go all the way back and see how Saratoga got started in the first place. In particular, I'd like to go into the question of how we got this name.

Why was this particular designation chosen when the town already had been known by three others? You've all seen the historical marker sign at Big Basin Way and Third Street, listing the names Tollgate, McCartysville and Bank Mills, before the name Saratoga was adopted. It's a frequently told story, including in this column, but for some reason I got to ruminating over the name Saratoga and how and why we got it.

Turn the page if this is too repetitive for you, but I think this was a really neat way for a town to get a name: It literally flowed from a mineral spring. The local spring was on a tributary to Saratoga Creek about a mile and a half up the canyon. The spring had been discovered in the early 1850s. Some time later, it was found that the mineral content of that water was identical with that of one of the Saratoga Springs in New York. That particular water source was known as Congress Springs, so ours became Pacific Congress Springs.

The name Saratoga was adopted by townspeople attending a patriotic gathering in October 1864, and it became official in March 1865, superseding the unpopular Bank Mills designation. OK, here we have a name, but how did it originate? What was its source? Here's where I had some fun eight years ago, with reverberations in City Hall.

I noted in a Stereopticon column eight years ago that, according to Florence Cunningham's definitive Saratoga's First Hundred Years, the name Saratoga is derived from an Iroquois word "Se-rach-to-que" meaning "floating scum on the water." It makes sense, if you've ever seen a film-like mineral coating over a body of standing water.

What didn't sit well with the readers when I brought this up in a column was the "scum" reference. In her account, Cunningham listed as its source "an official publication of New York State," which was not identified further. At the time eight years ago, a local resident said he had been told by a park ranger in the 1970s that Saratoga meant "scum that floats on the water."

The issue was complicated by another interpretation, cited by then-mayor Don Wolfe, to the effect that Saratoga is derived from an Indian word meaning "hillside country of the great river, place of the swift water." OK, so which do we have, swift or standing water? There were authorities cited on both sides. Wolfe had a letter from the historian and archivist for the city of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., identifying the probable source of the "floating scum" reference as a legislative manual from the mid-1930s. The letter also quoted the director of researchers for the federal Writing Project as saying that, as "one who has made an intensive research of the Indian lore of the county and the meaning of the Indian names, I can find no prominent authority for such derivation (floating scum) of the name, although I have consulted many authoritative references."

Wolfe closed the issue by issuing a mayoral proclamation embodying the "hillside country of the great river, place of the swift water" as the word's true meaning "for all official and ceremonial purposes, from this time forward."

I take comfort from the fact that, the Indian language of the time being an entirely spoken rather than written one, there is plenty of room for different interpretations. This was noted in one of the above-mentioned articles, which pointed out there were about 10 different Indian words for Saratoga.

Since the "great river, place of the swift water" interpretation is officially ensconced in city records, I guess there's no room for us "floating scum" partisans. I still think it could have had some interesting contemporary applications, such as a Saratoga High School water polo team known as the "Floating Scum."