Recently I and some other people in my office were looking at a map of Mississippi in an atlas published in 1959. About 5 miles west of Jackson, Mississippi it showed a town called Gowdey. One of the guys in my office grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and he said that he never heard of any such town. Later he called several members of his family who still live there, and they also say that there’s no such town.
Has anybody here ever heard of a town of this name? Can anybody find any evidence that such a town ever existed? I haven’t been able to find Gowdey in any other atlas I’ve checked, and I don’t see it mentioned in any website. (The atlas in which we found Gowdey on the map was The Standard International Atlas of the World.)
Yes, I can come up with some theories why it was put on the map. It could be just a copyright trap (an imaginary location on a map to trick the competitors of the map company). It could be just a mistake. Or it could have disappeared 40 years ago. Can somebody finds some actual evidence one way or the other?
The USGS Geographic Names server says there is no such place in Mississippi. You can check at http://geonames.usgs.gov for alternate spellings and stuff like that.
I lived in Jackson for a year, and traveled all over the state on secondary roads and interstates during that time. I never heard of it. Maybe SaintZero or one of our other Mississippians can shed further light on it.
A google search for Gowdey, Mississippi turned up nothing but people with the last name Gowdey.
You might want to check an older atlas in the event that this place has since ceased to exist. I encountered the same situation after seeing, on a 1949 map, the wonderfully absurd town of Honolulu, Alaska. Sadly, today it is no longer there. IIRC, if nobody sends any mail to a town, the USPO eventually declares the place dead.
I can ask my Dad in the morning (He’s worked at the DOT for years, and knows all the old guys who probably drew those old maps), but I suspect cornflakes probably has it right.
> Mapquest shows it as having been swallowed up by Carthage.
Where does Mapquest show it as being swallowed up by Carthage? I opened your link and it put me on the home page for Mapquest. I entered Gowdey, MS into the search engine there and got a message of “City not found”. When I put Carthage, MS into the search engine, I found two cities of that name in Mississippi, neither of which appears to be placed so as to swallow up a town that’s 5 miles west of Jackson. How did you use Mapquest to find Gowdey?
oh, one thing to consider is that “5 miles west of Jackson” puts you on the outskirts of Clinton. So it either got absorbed by Clinton or Jackson about then. It’s a common practice, you end up with neighborhoods which used to be small communities in their own right at one point.
There are several reasons why Gowdey, Mississippi could be on a map and not exist today. I have an 1895 map and it’s not on there (although both Asylum and Asylum Switch, neither of which shows up on the USGS placename server are on that map).
It was never an incorporated town (I can state that as a fact) so it may have been swallowed up by another city (it would help if you could give better directions in regards to Jackson and Clinton); or it may have been a name given unofficially to a little population center that was never officially a town and that name may have fallen out of use; or it was an old name for a town that has since changed it’s name (Utica in Hind County, Mississippi used to be Cane Ridge but you wont find the later name on the USGS Place Name Server).
Also, as near as I can tell, there isn’t a Gowdey street or road in are so a mapping error based on that isn’t the problem.
It just occurred to me that there is another explanation (after all, the guy selling the envelope postmarked in Gowdey, Hinds County Mississippi cannot be ignored). Prior to World War Two, the postal Service had many privately run Post Offices throughout the US (for a while during the depression, the Ida, Louisiana post office was my grandfather’s house). There may have been something like Gowdey’s Feed Store or the likes where the Gowdey family ran a Post Office for the locals. This would be a place where the people would have to get their mail because there wasn’t always rural deliver at the time. That could explain the Gowdey postmark (it was probably a hand stamp) and somehow someone got a hold of it and a map was made.
This is all speculation, but there had to be some place called Gowdey, but it wasn’t probably worth putting on a map, it just got there anyways.
By the way, I checked the variant names for all 133 populated places that came up in the USGS placename server listings for Hinds County, Mississippi and none of them list Gowdey, but that still doesn’t settle the issue. Medina, Ohio was called Mecca and before that Johnson’s Corner but the USGS only lists Mecca.
Like I said, a more definite location on where it was could (but not necessarily would) help solve the mystery.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History might have the answer. They’ll accept email requests from Mississippi residents for free (hint, hint Mississippi dopers), or snail mail requests from out of state for $15.
I live in Pratts, MS and believe it or not you can find it on Mapblast. I don’t know how long ago, but they changed the name which had been Froglevel. We are about 20 miles NE of Tupelo (using the Trace). A few miles NW of Tupelo is Frog Island and maybe the two were getting confused. There are two communities between here and Tupelo called Friendship and one more between Tupelo and Houston. If you go to Mapblast they list four named Friendship and none of them are the ones I’ve mentioned. That shows that we take being friendly real serious in these parts.
Besides the Houston mentioned above there is one only about five miles from here. So if you include all the communities, towns and cities in Mississippi there are a lot of duplications.
In regards to getting the names mixed up, I said that because there is a town north of here named Rienzi that used to be Cincinnati and the name was changed so that there wouldn’t be any confusion with Cincinnati, Ohio. This is not a tale, a joke or some obscure fact hidden away at the county seat. There is a big sign on RT. 45 telling all about it.
My favorite is Intercourse, MS but it doesn’t show up on Mapblast and may have been swallowed up by Oral.*
If Gowdey is slightly east of true south from Clinton–most likely explaination, swallowed up by a rapidly blobbing Jackson.
If south or southwest–most likely explanation, a small, rural, unincorperated town (probably nothing more that a crossroads)that no longer exists or is long longer refered to by that name.
I have an atlas from the 30s that has Gowdey on it. It’s about a mile or so from Jackson, just south of West Jackson and much closer than Clinton. It’s on the road leading to Raymond. The index says it has a population of 12.
There is a small village near me, called Whitwell. Population about 100, I guess.
It has a big road sign as you enter it ‘Twinned with Paris’.
(That is Paris, France, not Paris, Texas!)
And here’s how that legend arose.
The local publican wrote to Paris (population in the millions), saying that both communities have water running through them. (Paris has the mighty Seine river; Whitwell has a brook).
He proposed a twinning, saying ‘unless I hear otherwise from you, I’ll assume you agree.’
Inertia Selling had it’s usual effect, and the sign went up.
I’m surprised no one suggested that Gowdey might be a copyright trap. Cecil did a column on copyright traps in maps once (I’m too lazy to look it up. Search yourself.).
Mapquest lists a surprising number of non-existant towns. So many that I have to wonder why they even bother. Looking at the mapquest map of my county in Indiana (Monroe for those curious), I can count at least a dozen towns which don’t exist. Some of these I know existed at one time but were swallowed up as those regions of the county still bear those names. Others, however, are just bizarre and are obviously just names of housing developments (the names are Sunny Slopes, Garden Acres and West Brook Downs) which also don’t exist as I know exactly what is in those parts of town.
Mapquest also once got a bunch of us seriously lost as we were driving to Minneapolis. I don’t trust it at all anymore.
Let’s see, Gowdey is on the road to Raymond and had a population of 12.
Somewhere after World War II, route 18 (the road to Raymond) turned into a dual highway according to the maps I viewed on the web. Assuming it wasn’t swallowed by Jackson (and it should be pointed out that West Jackson no longer exists, it’s part of Jackson) or just evaporated (more than a few towns dissapeared during the depression and WWII) then it was probably a victim of America’s love affair with the automobile and didn’t survive the widening of 18.
It did, however, exist. And it did have a Post Office. It may be impossible to find more details without going to the library and doing a search of the local papers.