How Opa-locka got its name

Opa-locka City Hall. The Moorish architecture has been typical of the city since its founding by aviator Glenn Curtiss in 1926. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Opa-locka is a small city in the Miami metropolitan area of south Florida.

Its unusal name is supposed to have an Indian or “Native American” origin. But there is no documentation for the name before about 1926. That’s when the aviator Glenn Curtiss founded the city, during the 1920s craze for Florida real estate.1

When Curtiss first scouted the site, he was told that its “Indian name” was “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” He shortened this to “Opa Locka,” which sounded vaguely “Arabic-Persian” to him. This was the era of wildly popular “Arab” movies such as The Sheik and The Thief of Bagdad. So Curtiss dressed up Opa-locka in fanciful Moorish style to match the mood of the time.

The original name of the site almost certainly comes from the Creek/Seminole language. Most likely, it was Vpelofv rakko (“up-pee-LO-fa THLA-ko”), meaning “big hummock.” A hummock (or hammock) is an area of raised land within a swamp.2

The Seminole Indians were nearly all forced out of Florida by the mid-1800s, and those who remained were confined to two reservations. The English speakers who replaced them probably pronounced the name of the future Opa-locka as something like “Opalofa-locko.”

But by the mid-1920s, when Curtiss found out about it, the name had been corrupted to “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.”

Disclaimer

There is no way to be certain about the origin of “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” Because of the gap in time, and the apprent lack of evidence for any name before 1926, all we can do is speculate about the prior history.

All I’m offering is informed speculation. We can be sure that “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka” comes from Seminole, which is closely related to Creek. (Seminole and Creek differ only in pronunciation and vocabulary, like American English and British English.) And we know that the name already existed when Glenn Curtiss arrived on the scene. He didn’t invent the name from scratch or borrow it from some other part of the country.3

By the way, the authoritative Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee derives Opa-locka from the same source as the name of Opelika, Alabama, viz., opel’ rakko, “big swamp.” But this hypothesis overlooks the evidence of the long version of the name, “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.”

Besides, local traditions are remarkably consistent about the meaning of the original name. They all describe a hummock, or elevated ground within a swamp, rather than the swamp itself. We can never be sure, but vpelov rakko seems much more likely than opel’ rakko to be the original Seminole name.

Corruption of the name

So how did we get from Seminole vpelofv-rakko to English “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka”?

Once the name Vpelofv-rakko was translated into English sounds, it lost its semantic meaning, becoming a sequence of nonsense syllables. One nonsense syllable is as good as another. So as the name was transmitted orally, it became further corrupted in a series of steps we can only guess at now.

First, the final “o” was probably turned into a shwa, giving us “Opalofa-locka.”

Next, the “lofa-locka” sequence may have caused confusion among some speakers. Was it “Opa-lofa-locka” or “Opa-locka-lofa”? Someone must have substituted an entirely different sound for one of the troublesome syllables, and we had “Opa-tisha-locka.”

Next, someone may have remembered the final “locka” as “wocka,” leading to more confusion. Which was correct, “Opa-tisha-wocka” or “Opa-tisha-locka”?

Someone resolved this by stringing together both versions: “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” That’s the version heard by Glenn Curtiss in the mid-1920s.4

Translations

Since the city was established, local writers have suggested ever more elaborate translations of “Opa-tisha-wocka-locka.” Besides the most plausible meaning, “big hummock,” one finds the following prosy variants:

• “big island in the swamp covered with many trees” 5
• “a dry place in the swamp with trees” 6
• “the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place” 7

All of these appear to be elaborations on “big hummock,” a plain translation of vpelofv rakko.

So there you have it. To see how pedantic I am capable of becoming on this subject, click through to my work page on the derivation of “Opa-locka,” in my personal userspace at Wikipedia.

Notes

1 Glenn Curtiss was a celebrity in the early 20th century due to his exploits at designing and building motorcycles and airplanes. Curtiss founded an aircraft company and sold planes to the U.S. Navy. In the 1920s Curtiss jumped into the Florida land boom, founding or co-founding the cities of Hialeah, Opa-locka, and Miami Springs. Opa-locka, with its fanciful Moorish architecture, opened the same year as the 1926 film The New Klondike, which spoofed the Florida craze. A hurricane also roared ashore in south Florida that year, causing serious damage to Opa-locka. ↩
2 In IPA transcription: |əpi’lofə’ɬako| And for those who don’t already know: A swamp differs from a marsh in that a swamp has trees, but a marsh has grass. You might say a swamp is a forest with wet feet. ↩
3 Local historians all agree that the name antedates Curtiss’s interest in the place. Probably the first monograph about the city is Frank S. Fitzgerald-Bush, A dream of Araby: Glenn H. Curtiss and the founding of Opa-locka (Opa-locka, Fla.: South Florida Archaeological Museum, 1976). More recently, Opa-locka comes under discussion in Jan Nijman, Miami: mistress of the Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 27. ↩
4 This is pure speculation, of course. For another sequence of corruptions, see my work page on this topic at Wikipedia. ↩
5 See, among others: Larry Luxner, “Opa-locka rising,” Saudi Aramco World (Sept./Oct. 1989): 2-7. ↩
6 See, among others: U.S. Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, “80th anniversary of the founding of the city of Opa-locka, Florida,” Congressional Record 152 (part 7) (May 2006), p. 8922. ↩
7 This one appeared in some Miami Herald ad supplements and, in nearly identical wording, in Nieuwsbrief van de FAK, a newsletter from a Belgian arts faculty. Not one of the unique elements — “little river,” “north,” or “camping place” — is linguistically plausible. K.U. Leuven Association: Associated Faculty of Arts and Architecture (FAK), “A tale to be retold – Chevy Ridin High – Defining Place, Naming Place,” Nieuwsbrief van de FAK (March 2011): 4–7 [PDF]. ↩

English from the treetops

There’s a 400-year-old verse that I consider ideal for demonstrating change in the English language. It’s “The lowest trees have tops,” by a nobody called Edward Dyer.

The word cloud game

Ran some of my orphan dissertation notes through the word cloud machine:

I guess it’s obvious that I”m writing about the Creek Nation of American Indians.

Learning from writers

In struggling with the Big Writing Project lately, I’ve been getting unexpected sustenance from writers who are not particularly scholarly. It’s not easy to explain how this has worked.

How Mother Earth immigrated to America

Mother Earth is a woman who needs no introduction.

In the Old World, she’s been written up and talked about for a long, long time. Her stock was probably lowest around the sixteenth century, but since then she has come roaring back. Now pagans, poets, and environmentalists sing her praises, and everyone else has heard of her. (She has her own holiday, although people aren’t clear about which day it should be observed on.)

As best I can tell, though, she never visited the New World until after the Old World colonized it. She’s an immigrant.

Creek language treasures

Creek beaded pouch, early 1800s, from the Ulster Museum collection.

The Creek Language Archive just gets better and better. The website recently added Creek Texts by Mary R. Haas and James H. Hill, a trove of transcribed manuscripts in the Creek language on a variety of interesting subjects.

…este nak kērrvlket hvsoss-elecv sehokēpofv tat,
nake kērrulke ensukcv fvcfvkē omet sehok’t omvtēt omēs.

…and when gitlalgi (“knowers”) were in the southeast,
it was as if their pockets were full [of knowledge].

That’s from “Belief about the ihosá” [PDF]. Creek Indians gave the name ihosá to the being that causes people to get confused and lose their way in the woods. But for those who know, the ihosá can also give power.

The “pockets” mentioned in the text would have resembled the beaded pouch shown in the picture. These were usually attached to a broad, decorated shoulder strap. In fact, the colors in this pouch are subdued compared to most I’ve seen. I guess old-time Creek hunters would not have gone for Mossy Oak gear. (This pouch is further described here, although it’s wise to be skeptical about the specific provenance, i.e., “made for Tuskina, Chief of the Creek Indians, by his daughter”.)

Kissinger’s accent makes history

I’ve been listening to the Irish radio series (available in podcast) called “Speaking Ill of the Dead.” Based on an idea cooked up by some Montana historians, it’s a series of history lectures that seeks to balance the profession’s innate tendency toward hero worship by deliberately running down some eminent historical figures.

Montana has no end of colorful ne’er-do-wells whose lives can hardly be treated in any other way but with contempt.

Indian talk: The Long Man

One of the Indian phrases we white folks like to throw around now and again is the name “Long Man” or “Long Person” for a river. We tend to do this with the idea that Indians had some “primitive” idea of the river as a god of some kind. The fact is, the name and idea of a “Long Man” only occurred in some Indian cultures, in specific contexts.

Cherokee Indians do have a name for the conscious spirit of a river or stream, whose voice is said to speak in the waterfalls and rapids. Such a spirit is called ᏴᏫ ᎬᎾᎯᏔ (yvwi gvnahita), a long man or long person. In a 1900 report, ethnographer James Mooney referred to this being as a “river god,” but that seems to be a lazy and inaccurate comparison. I’ve found no evidence that Cherokees worshipped or sacrificed to these beings. Rather, they believed (and I suppose still believe) that a river has a consciousness, the wisdom of great age, and a capacity to teach lessons to receptive humans.

Pap Finn in the 21st century

Whenever his liquor begun to work he most always went for the govment.
— Huckleberry Finn

Ron Perlman as Pap Finn in a 1993 movie

Mark Twain’s character “Pap” Finn, the father of Huckleberry Finn, is an angry man. He’s angry at his son for giving him “sass” and disobeying him. He’s angry at the whole town for looking down on him, instead of respecting and fearing him as he knows they should. He’s angry at the meddling Widow Douglas for giving his good-for-nothing son a home and an education. And he’s angry at the law for withholding money he didn’t earn but feels entitled to.

Pap works out his anger by drinking and running riot whenever he can afford to. Or he takes it out on his son, lashing him without mercy as often as he can catch him. And when these fail him, he puts his anger into words. His rants are worthy of a comments thread on a 21st-century blog — and no less topical. He hated everyone he knew, but in his rants “he most always went for the govment.”

The star of empire

America wearing the star of empire. Detail from the painting “American Progress” (1872) by George Gast.

I’ve found some evidence of how the Anglo-Irish cleric George Berkeley’s verse, “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” became a “star of empire” on the cover of George Bancroft’s History of the United States. The connecting link seems to be John Quincy Adams, with an assist from Massachusetts poet Sarah Wentworth Morton.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) — the minister, mathematician, philosopher, Rhode Island planter, and namesake of Berkeley, California — was what we’d call a fan of Britain’s American colonies. So the last four lines of his “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” were frequently quoted on this side of the Atlantic — especially the first:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four Acts already past,
A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.