Lick and Run in Place Names

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Orion. I’m calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Welcome, Orion. What can we do for you?

I’ve had a question ever since I was a kid. I grew up in rural West Virginia, and I grew up on a road called Lick Run Road.

And whenever I’ve traveled outside of West Virginia and outside of the area, people think it’s a pretty silly name.

But all the roads around me had names similar to this. We have Mud Lick, Turkey Lick.

Different last names like Sanders Run Road.

I’ve been told that licks were named because of salt licks in the area.

And runs were named because that was the name of the creek or the crick that ran alongside where that road is now.

But I’ve also heard that lick might also just be another name for a creek,

And I wonder if you guys have any insight.

Yeah, we can offer some insight.

It’s interesting that you’re from West Virginia because if you map out the words lick and run in place names,

You find that West Virginia has big doses of both,

Lots of places that use lick and run in their names.

As a matter of fact, all throughout the North Appalachia,

East to the Pacific coast, you’ll find a lot of uses of run in names.

And a little south to that, probably mostly mid to North Appalachia,

You’ll find a lot of use of lick.

And lick is a place where animals would come to lick salt,

Naturally occurring salt. As a matter of fact, there’s a really interesting citation. There was

A guy by the name of James Hall who wrote a book called Letters from the West that he published in

London. He was an American, but he was writing about the American experience. And he talks about

These licks because it was kind of a thing that the Europeans weren’t really aware of. He says,

Some of those places have been licked for centuries until vast cavities have been formed.

So they’re literally licking the ground. But a lot of times you’ll find that sometimes the

The water is saline, and so the animals will drink that and then get the salt that the body requires.

So in any case, that’s what a lick is.

Now, a run is sometimes a creek or a small water course, but often a run is a deer path.

It is literally the place that the animals might run in between where they shelter for the evening,

Where they get their food, and where they get their water or they get their salt.

And so you will often find lick and run in places where there is a high density

Or has traditionally been a high density of deer.

As a matter of fact, if you look up deer density maps and such things exist,

Even now, hundreds of years after many of these places were named,

You will still find there are a lot of deer in the places where Lick and Run appear in place names.

That sounds exactly like where I grew up.

Run is the name of a small watercourse isn’t as common as Run is the name of a path.

As a matter of fact, you will find there are a variety of different uses of Run.

And even now in Missouri, where I grew up, run is used for these really terrible housing developments where they bulldoze the land and tear down all the trees and they’ll call it deer run.

And there are no deer left and there’s no run left.

But the memory of what was there is still in the name of the place.

Right. I love it when they call it the woods of St. Thomas or something.

There are no woods.

Yeah, we have a bit of that in the gentrification of the rural areas around where I grew up, too.

It’s now being developed in that same way, and they’ve kind of tried to reclaim a little bit of those names.

And where I grew up in Kentucky, we had Big Bone Lick State Park.

Big Bone Lick State Park, yeah.

Yeah, because it’s a lick, but they found big bones from prehistoric animals.

So the lick is really about animals and their need for salt and finding it naturally in the environment.

Yeah, I just wonder, I didn’t realize how prolific that was because I had heard a lot about salt licks.

As well. And I know, too, when I did like watershed research around where I was from,

I was surprised that a lot of those little creeks, they all had names. I mean, you have to.

And a lot of those names coincided with the roads that ran like along the same path.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think that’s where I got my confusion from.

Place names contain history, don’t they?

Yeah. I’m really glad I’m going to hold on to that a little closer to my heart now.

That’s nice.

Outstanding. Orion, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m a big fan of the show.

All right, thanks. Take care now.

Thanks, Orion.

All right, bye.

Bye-bye.

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