Offensive names disappear as Americans redraw map

For more than a century, Negrohead Mountain has towered over the countryside north of Malibu, offering unrivalled views of the Pacific to generations of hikers.

But this week, at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen, the striking landmark's time-honoured name disappeared from local maps.

The 620m summit will henceforth be known as Ballard Mountain, a name deemed to be more in keeping with the modern era.

The new title honours a blacksmith and former slave called John Ballard, who was among the first men to settle in its foothills in 1880, after fleeing Los Angeles to escape persecution by segregationist police officers.

One hundred people attended the renaming ceremony for the peak, including Ballard's great-grandson Reggie, a retired fireman, who said the United States Geological Survey's decision to approve the altered name "means a lot to me", adding: "It's not often you get the chance to right a historical wrong."

But while few at the event begrudged locals the chance to remove a racial slur from their footpath signs, the move wasn't universally well received.

The renaming of Negrohead Mountain marked the latest step in a controversial trend of rebranding landmarks. And historians fear the push to replace colourful words with acceptable alternatives is seeing the nation's heritage sacrificed at the altar of political correctness.

In San Francisco, the county board of supervisors debated a bizarre-sounding proposal to change the name of the Mt Diablo State Park to Mt Reagan State Park. The move was eventually rejected, but not before a group of right-wing Christian activists had advanced a case to the effect that the park's historic name, which is Spanish for "devil", is profane and highly offensive to religious people.

More than 70,000 locals joined a Facebook group opposing the change.

In the past two decades, nine US states have passed laws against place names deemed offensive to Native Americans - for instance, in 2001, Squaw Lake became Serenity Lake.

Areas mapped during the gold rush were often given names that reflected the no-nonsense argot of prospectors.

Generations of students have giggled at a river in California that enjoys the name Shitbritches Creek. That somewhat lavatorial name has survived. As has a place called Intercourse in Pennsylvania, and Crappo, in Maryland.

- INDEPENDENT