What’s in a name?

This question was posed by playwright and poet William Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” in the mid-1590s, and it is the one we here at the Franklin County Times took on for this year’s Progress edition.

Although Shakespeare’s follow-up assertion – “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” seems to discount the value of a name, we took a different view. We know the name of something can have a lot of meaning tied up in it.

This year’s Progress edition, which hit shelves this past week, takes a look at the people whose names grace many of our local buildings and outdoor sites. Some people might not know the stories of these namesakes, and we want to make sure they are not forgotten.

These people will live on in this community thanks to the lasting contributions they made during their lifetimes – contributions that earned them a kind of recognition that can’t be easily overlooked, their names emblazoned on buildings and signs across the county.

Who was A.W. Todd, anyway? Why is Red Bay Elementary’s playground named for Martha Ree Bostick? Who is Parrish Stadium named after?

If you don’t know, you’re about to find out.

Now, let me be clear: This issue of Progress is definitely not a comprehensive list of every place in Franklin County named after someone. That would be nearly impossible. Please, don’t call me and say, “Why didn’t you include such-in-such, which is named after so-and-so?” Time and page space would fail to represent them all – and even if we tried, we’d be almost sure to leave someone out.

We certainly didn’t mean to imply that any one person leaves a more valuable legacy for Franklin County than another, and there are plenty of namesakes we did not include. Who knows – maybe we can take up this theme again in the future.

We do hope, however, that this edition of Progress can be just a small tribute to the people whose legacies live on through the places named after them.