Layer two, crown
St. Nicholas
was San Nicolas
There is no document in which anybody renames this place. The Spanish form simply stopped being the one people said, and the record follows the mouths rather than the other way round.
What is recorded
- Language
- Spanish, anglicized
- Year fixed
- Spanish period, anglicized through the 1800s
- Fixed by
- Nobody decided it; English speakers wore the Spanish down
- There now
- A residential district on the south bank, still carrying the anglicized form
Spanish Florida left a set of saints' names along this river, and one of them sat on the south bank opposite the crossing. In the Spanish period it is San Nicolas. In American records it becomes St. Nicholas, and that is what the street signs say now.
Nowhere in between is there an act of renaming. No plat, no ordinance, no post office application changing one for the other. The record simply shifts, gradually, as the people writing it change.
What erosion looks like in a record
This is the most common way a name changes, and it is the hardest to date, because there is no date. What there is instead is a period during which both forms appear, sometimes in the same document, and after which only one does.
That pattern is worth recognizing, because a reader who goes looking for the moment of change will not find one and may conclude the records are incomplete. They are not. The absence of a moment is the finding.
Three things move at once during erosion of this kind. The saint's title is translated, San to St. The vowels shift to what an English speaker does with them. And the stress moves. By the end the word is an English word that happens to be about a Spanish saint.
How to tell erosion from a decision
The catalogue has both kinds, and the test is simple: look for a document with a date and a signature.
A deliberate change leaves one. When a developer plats a subdivision and calls it something, there is a plat with a date on it, and this register cites it. When a town votes to be annexed and its name spreads over a wider area, there is a record of the vote.
Erosion leaves none of that. It leaves two spellings overlapping for decades. If a reader finds a confident date for a change of this kind on any site, including this one, the right response is to ask which document carries it, and checking a name explains how to go and look.
The thing this entry is not
It is not a claim that the Spanish form was more correct. It was earlier. Names are not more or less correct, they are fixed or not fixed, and by whom, and when. The whole method of this register is to answer those questions and to decline the ones about correctness.
Nor is it a claim about the saint. The register records that the name is a saint's name from the Spanish period. Why that saint, on that bank, is not documented in anything this publication has been able to reach, and so it is not printed here as though it were.