Granville Then & Now – February 10, 2022 – Mettowee River: it’s spelled with an 'o'

Mettowee River: it’s spelled with an 'o'

By Erik Pekar, Town Historian

Starting in the township of Dorset, Vermont, a river flows through the towns of Rupert and Pawlet, entering New York in Granville, until it meets Wood Creek in Whitehall. This is the Mettowee River, an important and iconic part of the communities it flows through.

For years, however, there has been confusion regarding the spelling of the river’s name. Many write “Mettowee,” with an “o”: Mettowee Street, Mettowee Valley Family Health, Mettowee Park. But there are also those who write it with an “a”: NYSDOT’s signs for “Mettawee River” and the Mettawee Community School in Pawlet.

“Mettowee” is not the first name to be used for this river. One of the earliest maps showing the river, a British map published c. 1777, has the lower Mettowee labeled as Skenesborough Creek. This name likely continued downstream, through today’s Whitehall, to Lake Champlain. This name was soon lost; the new American settlers of Whitehall soon named the downstream river Wood Creek and continued that name upstream along the river flowing from past Fort Ann and Smith’s Basin, and not the river flowing from the Granville area.

In the early 19th century, the Mettowee had two different names. On the New York side, the river was called the Granville River. On the Vermont side, the river was called the Pawlet River. Some earlier writings doubled the “t” (as spelt by the Pawlett Historical Society) and some even had the name spelled as the Paulet or Paulette River.

The word “Mettowee” is of native origin, said to be from the St. Francis tribe, believed to be a subgroup of the Iroquois or the Caughnawaga. The word Mettowee was said to originate from two possible words, “meetwe” or “metewis.” The latter term meant “black earth,” referring to the fertile land where two rivers meet; it may have referred to the confluence of the Mettowee and Indian Rivers, immortalized in the opening lines of the present Granville school song, “where the rippling Indian River joins the Mettowee.”

“Mettowee” is as the river name began to appear in the late 1860s. One early mention, in an 1869 issue of the Daily Saratogian, oddly uses the “a” spelling, although at this point it may have been the Saratogian editor’s phonetic attempt at an unfamiliar term. The earliest business to bear the name of “Mettowee” was Mettowee Hall, a meeting hall attested in an 1866 issue of the Washington County People’s Journal, the predecessor to the paper now called the Greenwich Journal-Press. The 1870s was when the earliest organization with the river name was established, the Mettowee Valley Agricultural Society.

A name was formally designated by the U.S. government around 1895. The Mettowee spelling with an “o” was originally used. As early as the 1920s, there were spelling discrepancies regarding the river name. Some maps, including the surveyor’s 1927 planning map for the village sewer system, spelled the river name differently with an “a,” as “Mettawee.”

The issue came to a head in 1932. The government arbitrated and made a decision. The writer wrote Mettowee with an “o,” in a script that made the “o” look like an “a.” As a result, it appeared the score had been settled in favor of using the “a,” and “Mettawee” continued to be used in some state and all federal contexts.

Around the start of 1937, work was done on a bill in the state Legislature regarding river work for the Mettowee River. The regional representative, E. Harold Cluett, originally intended to use the correct spelling. In order to rush the bill through, he instead used the federal Army Corps of Engineers’ inaccurate “Mettawee” spelling so that the government records and state bill would “harmonize” in their spelling.

The matter was mentioned in the Sentinel in 1943, and again in 1953 when it made the 10-year group of items in the “from our files” feature. This caused quite the discussion in Granville, enough to warrant comment from Sentinel columnist Morris Rote-Rosen. The spelling issue came up again in 1973, when Irv Dean, writer for the Glens Falls Post-Star, noticed the discrepancy in spelling and discussed the matter with Rote-Rosen.

Through the years, many businesses and organizations appeared with the name of Mettowee. Besides the hall and agricultural society, there were also the Mettowee Grange, Mettowee Valley Cemetery, Mettowee Garage, the Mettowee Players, Mettowee Valley Family Health Center and a road, Mettowee Street. All of these spelled the river name with an “o.”

No entity spelled the name with an “a” until the late 1990s, over a century after “Mettowee” first came into usage. The first organization to spell it with an “a” was “Mettawee Community School,” the name of the new consolidated elementary school in Pawlet; the school opened in 1998.

The question of spelling “Mettowee” appeared again in the summer of 2010, when an area resident wrote to the Sentinel regarding the issue, and Sentinel reporter Matthew Rice decided to take a look at the matter. Rice talked with a few different people, who either thought it was spelled with an “o” or thought it could be spelled both ways since they had seen it spelled both ways. In the end, Rice left the actual question unresolved, not stating which way was correct.

The spelling of the name of the Mettowee River has been a topic of discussion off and on for more than 90 years. The historical record shows that the “o” spelling, Mettowee, is correct. This is proven by the conspicuous absence of entities with the “a” spelling until opening of the Mettawee Community School in 1998, and the many, many businesses and organizations over the years that spelled Mettowee with the “o” spelling. It’s something to think about as one crosses over the Mettowee River on a bridge, or the next time one takes part in recreational activities along the Mettowee River.