Cottage Grove from Coast to Coast: The Genealogy of a Place Name

Abstract

ONCE A COLLEAGUEASKEDME: What was the name of that place came from in Wisconsin? and when I answered, Grove, all he said was, you made it Well, I didn't, of course, and the true village is more amusing and more interesting than anything I could make up. Besides, ever since fourth grade, I had known that the town was given its rustic name back in 1840 by its second settler, William C. Wells, who built his cottage a log cabin in a natural grove of.the big burr oaks that are so much a part of the landscape of southern Wisconsin. And I had been aware, chiefly through missent mail, that there were other Cottage Groves in the country; after being accused of fabricating my own, I grew more curious about them. My collection now numbers eleven, including home, which is ten miles east of Madison, Wisconsin. The name quite literally spans the country, from Connecticut to California and Oregon and from Wisconsin to Texas. There are others in Minnesota, Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. Where did Cottage Grove begin? The presence of one in New England would, on the surface, invite conjecture that this name, like so many others, had moved westward with the migrating yankees in the nlid-19th century. On the other hand, the desire to put a cozy complexion on a drafty log house sheltered by a few oak trees may have led to a series of on-the-spot coinages. The first problem, then, in tracing the name, becomes one of chronology. The dean of Connecticut place name collecting, Professor Morse Allen of Trinity College, says that our eastern cousin appears first on an 1892 United States Geological Survey topographic map; later it is listed on a Central New England Railway tImetable as a station 4.1 miles northwest of Hartford. Earlier maps and histories