Learning about your community yields all sorts of surprises. Take a look at the image on the left that was one of the initial plans for the part of La Mott west of Sycamore Avenue. It includes the public school that is now known as the La Mott Community Center. You can see, and this by the way is only part of the original planning document, that what is now B-D Street was originally going to be called Bee Dee Street. On the right is a photo I took of the community gardens and this view shows the intersection at Graham Lane and B-D Street. I don't know why and when the street name spelling changed, but obviously it did. As a child, we understood that the street was named after a pack of Bad Dogs that roamed the street or Benjamin Davis, who ever that was.
Please note that on the image on the left the school is called Camp Town Public School. This is one of a few original documents that a neighbor gave me the opportunity to digitally photograph. It is also one of the only documents that I've ever seen that has the original name of the village of Camp Town. Sometime after the after the Civil War when the land was known as Camp William Penn the area was planned with the names of the owners of various parcels of land and the street names. Notice also the one street is called "Beach" and in actuality became "Beech" Avenue.
On the other side of this small map, which is about 5" x 8", Edward Davis' name appears. (Actually, the name reads as E. M. Davis.) I make the assumption that this is Edward M. Davis, Lucretia Mott's son-in-law. Anyhoo, on this side of the map, he refers to the date January 1, 1885. The document itself is not dated, so perhaps it was prepared in 1884. Best as I can figure, he was instrumental in planning part of the village. I've not seen a map that refers to the village east of Sycamore Avenue, but perhaps there is one in existance somewhere.
Do you know how any of the streets in your community got their name? What urban legends exist about the area where you live?
