Street and Road Names in Chester County, Pennsylvania

Abstract

T HE STREET-NAMING PRACTICES developed during twenty years of phenomenal suburban growth offer an interesting contrast to older urban practices.1 New names and a new system for varying the old patterns and freshening old materials are emerging and can be seen clearly in Chester County, Pennsylvania, a region still largely rural but enjoying rapid growth in areas only recently considered within commuting distance to Philadelphia.2 As in the case of cities laid out a hundred years ago, these exploding suburbs have required large numbers of new street names for the 266 miles of new streets built in Chester County between 1951 and 1965.3 It is particularly significant that 117 miles of these new streets lie within 5 east-central townships through which run the major highways and railroads to Philadelphia. These 5 fastest growing townships4 offer a striking contrast in several aspects of street naming to the 16 older urban areas (boroughs and the city of Coatesville) as well as to the relatively stable, generally rural, 52 other townships. Of the 2,712 names I collected for the county as a whole, 756 refer to streets primarily in urban areas, 1,316 to those in the more stable