To the Editor:

Having spent much of my childhood playing in the creek that flows along Schoharie Plank Road West, and having jumped many times across the other creek at the end of Sand Street to get to school, it always bothered me that neither one had a name.

So, many years later when I discovered that my linguistics professor at the University of Albany, Maryanne Mithun, was fluent in Mohawk, I asked her for help in giving our creeks indigenous names, like the Kayaderosseras of Saratoga County.

She translated “the creek of the shale bed” into a Mohawk phrase that I anglicized as “Ostenraky”; and she translated “the creek that falls from the cliff,” into another phrase that anglicized as “Joriohenen.” Later I learned with elation that the Altamont Village Board adopted these names at their meeting of March 20, 1979.

Now, however, I’ve discovered that both creeks already had names. It’s taken 44 years but, with apologies to everyone, I can confirm that both creeks already had names long before the village board adopted the names I proposed for them.

On the 1854 Gould map, the creek where we caught salamanders at the end of Euclid Avenue is labeled “Ely Cr.,” but this is a typo, I’m sure now, for “Fly Creek.”

A description of a foreclosed lot on School Street (now Lincoln Avenue) in The Altamont Enterprise (Dec. 11, 1896, p. 4, col. 8) uses “Fly Creek” as one of its coordinates: “Also one other piece or parcel of land [...] beginning at an elm tree near the center of what is known as the Fly Creek north of the Helderburgh Creamery lot and runs then in an easterly direction through the center of said creek 200 feet to the west line of School street ….”

And this entry from the diary of George Thornton, who lived off of Lainhart Road north of the village and had to cross the same creek to do business in Altamont, mentions the “Fly Creek bridge” that took traffic onto Church Street (now Maple Avenue): “September 26, 1899: Still raining this morning. A foot of rain last night – some say 17 inches. [...]. The Fly Creek bridge is gone.” (Dawn Soper, “Lake Onderdonk” in The Altamont Enterprise, Sept. 16, 1977, p. 4).

Admittedly, “Fly Creek” is not a pleasant-sounding name for a creek. If we are determined to use its original name, we’ll have to remind ourselves that the name “Fly Creek” doesn’t have anything to do with house flies but rather, comes from a Dutch word that extended its meaning in the New World to “watercourse” in a general sense, as explained by Dr. Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Research Center in his presentation “Where a Kill is not a Kill and a Fly is not a Fly” (New Scotland Historical Association, May 5, 2023).

Dr. Gehring will give an expanded version of this talk at the October 2023 meeting of the Guilderland Historical Society, so there’s more on this subject yet to come!

The other Altamont Creek — the one that flows past the Altamont Elementary School — also had a name before it became the Joriohenen (although I have never in my life heard anyone ever use it): the “Severson Creek.”

This name is not so surprising, since all the land south of Main Street was once part of the original Severson farm, which is itself marked by the roadside marker near the fire hall.

Here’s the evidence, again from The Altamont Enterprise (Aug. 4, 1893): “We understand that the Messrs. Sand have released Grand Street, from Main St. to the Driving Park [the old name for the fairgrounds], to the town, and that will give us a substantial bridge over the Severson Creek forty five feet wide, taking in both sidewalks on Grand Street. This will make this throughfare the finest in the village.”

To complicate matters, I have a photocopy of a 1924 map of Altamont that shows the same Severson Creek labeled as “Wood Brook.”

I still prefer the Mohawk names Ostenraky and Joriohenen. After all, we have so little evidence of the Native American presence in our area!

But I also realize that the ones who care the most about the Joriohenen and the Ostenraky are the children who play in them, and that Altamont kids will likely go on referring to their creeks the way we always did when we would say “Let’s go play in the creek.”

Tom Capuano

Altamont