Origin of Mon's Name a Mystery
Washington
PA Observer Reporter
23 May 2011
By Scott Beveridge, Staff writer
sbeveridge@observer-reporter.com
Judging from the massive landslide that recently buried a road along
the Monongahela River near Fredericktown, the Indians who once roamed
the region were onto something when they called it the "river with
falling-in banks."
No one knows for sure, though, which European settler stood along its
banks and proclaimed it should be named the Monongahela, said historian
John K. Folmar of California.
"It was just used by the first white guys who heard them talking. There
was no unification as to how to spell it," said Folmar, a retired
history professor at California University of Pennsylvania.
Journalists who covered the May 13 landslide at a steep cliff near the
river that put 1,700 tons of rock, mud and debris on Route 88 were
reminded of what they thought was a legend about the naming of the
river.
But it turns out to be a true story about Indians using the word to
describe a river with unstable banks, according to Folmar's research.
There is a mention in the 1937 book, "The Monongahela: The River and
its Region" by Richard T. Wiley about a Moravian missionary named John
Heckewelder hearing the word while laboring among the Delawares, Folmar
said.
Heckewelder collected in the 1760s the names the Delawares had given to
Pennsylvania's rivers, and spelled Monongahela Menaungehilla.
It wasn't until the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on July 26, 1786, published
a story about the naming rights to the river that a reputable source
linked the name to the American Indians, Folmar said.
That story indicated the word had signified in some of the Indian
languages a river with "falling-in banks," or a stream with collapsing
or mouldering banks, Folmar said.
There were still as many as 20 different spellings for the river name,
and the county around Morgantown, W.Va., calls itself Monongalia to
this day.
Of course the river didn't look as it does today, either, before it was
transformed in the 20th century into a network of locks and dams with
pools maintaining a navigation depth of at least 9 feet. People could
walk across the Mon during drought season, including one in the 1860s
when that was possible to do that between Pittsburgh and its South
Side, Folmar said.
And, he said, there were no tribes native to Southwestern Pennsylvania
living in the area when the European settlers began to arrive in the
1700s. It remains a great mystery as to why the native mound builders
disappeared, leaving behind vast archaeological evidence of their
primitive settlements, Folmar said.
"It would have been a different history had there been Indians in the
valley when the white folk arrived here," Folmar said.
Those tribes had been gone for hundreds of years. The natives who did
show up had moved in from the West to take part in frontier battles
with the French as the New World was expanding, Folmar said.
He then joked that the river's name would be appropriate to describe
the blight the Mon Valley has experienced in the decades since the
steel industry collapsed in the 1980s.
"The valley is crumbling in more ways than one," he said.