I like Dio’s suggestion: Bull’s Head. It lends itself to all sorts of plot points, including the controversy over its having an apostrophe (misspellings, etc.)
There’s a town in Maryland called “Scaggsville” but if you put that in your story, no one would believe it.
A couple from my neck of the woods:
Thunder Swamp
Newton Grove
Goldsboro
Seven Springs
Dudley
Goshen
Faison
Mt. Olive
Calypso
Have you ever actually been to the Ozarks? I think a really good suggestion would be to write about something or someplace that you know about. Because this place that you are describing so well doesn’t resemble anything of the Ozarks where I grew up. Your setting sounds like more of what I’ve seen of the South than the Ozark region.
Most place names in that region reflect the landscape–so lots of “mountain” something or other and lots of “walnut” something or other. Mountain Home, Walnut Grove, Cave Springs, etc.
Most rural southern Missouri-northern Arkansas “backwoods” people have more of an issue with what they perceive as big city folk than they do of Yankees. Most Ozarkians are midwesterners with a southern influence, not traditional southerners.
And the church wouldn’t be Southern Baptist, it would be an Assemblies of God-type offshoot.
And lakes–not so much. Creeks. This is a very rocky terrain–most of the lakes in this region are man-made and large, not many natural lakes. People in rural areas got their drinking water from underground springs or wells. The ground is rocky & everything sits on a bed of limestone.
You write very well and your beginning to your story was interesting, but my suggestion would be to change the setting to somewhere that you are familiar with. Move it to a place that you know and then you won’t need any help in naming your town because you will already know it. And that’s my hillbilly 2 cents.
Waldo Elmer was the founder of the town, thus it was named Elmerton. Don’t laugh! With a name like Elmerton, no wonder the town never grew.
Assboink. There may already be one in Idaho, though.
Bules Gore has always been my favorite, with what, two families living in it?
I second DtC’s suggestion of Bull’s Head, or, based on CRich’s description of the area, you might modify it to Bull’s Creek. The “bull” allows for the Indian aspect, too.
Don’t forget the good ones man !!
That’s my neck of the woods too !!
Beaulaville
Bentonville
Sleepy Creek
Hopewell
Outlaws Bridge
Beautancus
Red Hill
Pink Hill
Buckleberry
Blizzards Crossroad
Oh yeah…one more :
Gobblers Knob
I’ve lived in the Arkansas Ozarks, including a stint in Jasper, which at approximately 450 people is the largest town in and the county seat of Newton County, Arkansas. Other nearby communities include Nail, Deer, Swain, Parthenon, Mt. Judea (pronounced “Mount Judy”), Ponca, Boxley, Pruitt, Hasty, Bass, Lurton, Mt. Sherman, and Limestone. Not to mention that the area between Parthenon and Nail is home to novelist Donald Harington’s semi-mythical hamlet of Stay More, which has featured in several of his novels. Newton County is so much the epicenter of “hillbilly” culture in America that for twenty years or so it was home to Dogpatch, U.S.A., the theme park based on the characters from Al Capp’s Lil Abner comic strip. The site was the former community of Marble Falls, about seven miles north of Jasper on Arkansas Highway 7, about halfway to Harrison.
I agree with the others that you’ve got a cliche instead of a town in there. And several things are just wrong, for that region. One major howler is the idea that people in that part of the world would be pining for a Confederate victory. Most people in the mountainous parts of the South – the really mountainous parts, like western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and northern/northwestern Arkansas – were as likely or even more likely to support the Union during the Civil War as the Confederacy. Indeed, one of Harington’s novels is about a mountaineer (loosely based on a real figure) who became governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, in large part because of his support of the Union during the war. You want unreconstructed Confederates, you’re gonna have to move this one to Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia (Piedmont region and southward). And CRich is right – there ain’t no lakes 'round there – ground’s too damn steep and rocky (which is another problem – there’s no place in the Ozarks that’s “occasionally hilly” – it’s all hilly). Why would you wanna drink stagnant lake water when you’ve got the coldest, clearest, freshest water in the world bubbling up out of the ground from springs all around you, or at least in a creek fed by one or more of those springs. You also don’t get “tight clusters” of buildings around there. Most of the people who settled that part of the world were trying to get the heck out of Tennessee and North Carolina and north Georgia when they started getting too damn crowded – you know, a house and farm every few miles or so. These people didn’t like living right on top of each other, and generally built as far away from each other as was practical.
Many years ago I rode with my friend in his 18-wheeler on a route to North Carolina.
We saw this sign:
Welcome to Bull’s Head, NC
Population: Several
[joke I must make every time we see signs for this (N.J.) town]
Hey! It’s Popeye’s favorite town!
[/jImmetwssft(NJ)t]
You’re probably thinking of Bull Shoals Lake, which is a man-made lake on the White River in north central Arkansas.
Yeah, but Jacksonville’s a thriving metropolis – must be 30,000 people there, and it’s right on the outskirts of North Little Rock, and is home to Little Rock Air Force Base – it ain’t isolated, and all the woods around town been cleared for farms a hundred years ago.
Yeah, but again, there’s no way you’re gonna find that name in the hills. Osceola was a Seminole whose resistance to the white takeover of Florida was legendary, but it’s very much a flatlander thing – the Osceola in in Arkansas is in the flat, northeastern part of the state near the Mississippi, and the the folks who decided to call it that probably settled there years before there were more than a few dozen white folks in the whole Ozark region. Most hillbillies wouldn’t have ever heard of Osceola. They might have known a few Indians who escaped the Trail of Tears in the earliest years of settlement, but there are almost no Indian names in the Arkansas Ozarks – can’t think of any offhand. Unlike the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, where whites and Indians lived side-by-side for decades (indeed, even centuries), the Indians were gone by the time English-speaking settlers made their way to Arkansas in any number, doubly so in the Ozarks. So there was no way, and no need, for them to preserve any existing Indian place names.