She was from Belgium, but not that Belgium. Onomastics and toponymy were on my mind, during a series of long and short car drives, some hiking, and a couple of ferry rides. We were spending a few late summer days in Door County, the finger-shaped Wisconsin peninsula that has long been a site of relaxation and escape, of lighthouses, wineries and cherry pies, a sort of Great Lakes version of Cape Cod.
Onomastics is the study of names – their origin and history – while toponymy, a subset of onomastics, is the study of place names. There is also anthroponomastics, the study of personal names. All of these came into play as we explored the peninsula.
The drive north into Wisconsin is an exercise in linguistic archeology. You pass Sheboygan – most likely a Chippewa word meaning “passage between lakes” – and enter a transplanted, reconfigured European landscape: Kiel (after a German port on the Baltic), New Holstein (the old one is in northern Germany, near Denmark), and then Denmark itself, which is actually surrounded by a larger entity, New Denmark. In the neighboring county, Luxemburg welcomes you. Crossing into Door County, the Belgian influence is notable: signs for Brussels and Namur attract your attention. Local establishments bear French names, likely of Walloon origin: Renard, Boudreau.
After you pass the only real town, Sturgeon Bay, you head north both literally and figuratively, into a landscape where the Scandinavian and Nordic associations predominate. Among them: the five Nordic flags (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) on some of the buildings. Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant, with its legendary goats on the sod roof, so placid they look like automatons. The old church in the tiny village of Ephraim, founded by a Norwegian sect of Moravians. The bays, woods, sturdy houses, red roofs, and general atmosphere reminded me of Gotland in the Baltic, or the islands of the Stockholm archipelago – though with a lot more tourist activity and commercial glitz.
But the glitz largely disappears once you leave the peninsula and head still further north, to Washington Island and Rock Island. These islands, befitting their status as Door County’s northernmost outposts, became a locus of Icelandic immigration in the 19th century. To this day, the islands’ Nordic heritage is ubiquitous. On Washington, the larger island, the Sunset Resort serves Norwegian grilled toast and Icelandic pancakes. Names like Jorgensen and Gunnlaugsson adorn the mailboxes. And right in the center of the island stands the stavkirke or stave church, modeled after an original structure in Borglund, Norway:
Rock Island has no full-time residents. But it does have the Pottawatomie Lighthouse - its name a nod to the area's Native American heritage - and one of the most singular works of architecture in the state: the Viking Hall and Boathouse, the brainchild of Chicago-based inventor and businessman Chester Thordarson, born Hjörtur Þórðarson in Iceland in 1867: