Newstead Montegrade is dead! Long live Newstead Monteglade!

Ah, Newstead Montegrade, we hardly knew ye!

Thanks to some crack detective work by the Boston Public Library and some never-say-die stick-to-it-tiveness by Ron Newman, the U.S. Geological Survey's Board on Geographic Names - the official government arbiter of place names - has issued a ruling on whether Newstead Montegrade actually exists:

Basically, the board will be changing the name of the place to Newstead Monteglade (note the 'l') and marking it as historical, which means nobody actually lives there, which is pretty obvious to anybody who's ever visited the place.

Here's the official word:

Our apologies for not getting back to you sooner. As Mr. Payne indicates, we have researched the origin of this name, which is listed as an official entry in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the nation's official geographic names repository (). The name "Newstead Montegrade" was added to GNIS during routine compilation of Massachusetts geographic names, as a result of its having been published in The Topographic Atlas of Massachusetts (Walling & Gray, 1871; Plates 41, 49 and 55). Although we cannot pinpoint the exact date when the name was added to GNIS, it was likely during the period 1978-1982, when "Phase I" of data compilation took place. The name does not appear on any available Federal maps.

Based on the information uncovered recently by the Boston Public Library, and the citation in Samuel Sawyer's book, we shall revise the entry in GNIS to "Newstead Monteglade" (that is, with an "l" rather than an "r"), and retain "Newstead Montegrade" as a variant name (that is, any name other than the official name, even a typographic error). We shall also add the notation "historical" to the name to indicate the feature is no longer recognized as an existing geographic entity. Although our definition of "populated place" as a Feature Type is intended to refer broadly to any area where people live (or lived), we shall in this case change the Type to "locale," which suggests an area where human activity occurs (or occurred) but where there are not necessarily any permanent residents. Finally, we shall add a note in the History Field of the GNIS entry to indicate that the name was very likely derived from that of two estates which once existed at that location.

We are currently undergoing an extensive redesign of GNIS, so unfortunately we cannot make any of these corrections at the moment. However, we shall retain this information until the database is available again (in the next two weeks, we understand). Once the redesign is complete, the corrected entry will appear at the GNIS website.

We appreciate everyone's interest and assistance in this case, and we thank you for your efforts to make GNIS a more detailed and accurate source of geographic names information. If you have any questions or if we can assist in the future, please let us know.

Sincerely yours,
Jennifer Runyon, research staff U.S. Board on Geographic Names
USGS Geographic Names Office Reston, VA 20192-0523
(703) 648-4550
[email protected]
http://geonames.usgs.gov