For years, I have gone with friends to a certain island in Lake Erie for a writers’ retreat, and I am always careful to spell the name of the island as it appears on the ferry: Kelleys Island. My friends, well-educated people, sometimes give it an apostrophe, writing Kelley’s Island, and sometimes misspell it, too: Kelly’s Island. Together we have poked around in the island cemetery, where you cannot miss the obelisk that commemorates the Kelley family. Originally, there were two of them on the island, brothers, Datus and Irad, immigrants from Connecticut. Kelleys Island was part of Connecticut’s Western Reserve, which at one time stretched all the way to the Pacific. The surveyors named it Island No. 6. Eventually, the Kelleys bought up every plot on the island, and developed its natural resources, which consisted mostly of fish (perch and walleye) and limestone. They also grew grapes and made wine, but, in my opinion, they needn’t have bothered with the wine.
As it happens, Kelleys Island presents a paradigm of apostrophe use. If, say, Datus Kelley had coveted his brother Irad’s share of the land and slain him with a large chunk of the island’s indigenous limestone, leaving just one Kelley, the island would properly have been called Kelley’s Island, with an apostrophe plus s. Because there were two Kelley brothers and they shared the island, fishing and quarrying and winemaking, the island was named after both Kelleys, the plural being formed the regular way, by adding an s, and the possessive by hanging an apostrophe onto the end: Kelleys’ Island. Easy. An apostrophe s may sound the same as an s used to form a plural, but not for us what Fowler calls a “fatuous vulgarism.” The Kelleys are long gone—the Kelley Mansion, the showplace of the island, is now owned by a guy named Lemley, who sits on the porch in overalls and charges two dollars for a tour. As the plural form of a proper noun, Kelleys can be used as an attributive: Kelleys limestone, like Beatles music or Carrara marble. Well, maybe not so much like Carrara marble.
Anyway, that was how I justified the lack of an apostrophe in Kelleys Island. It’s not as if there weren’t legions of stray apostrophes camping out on the island. There is a store called Village Tee’s, meaning, I suppose, T-shirts (or golf tees?) of the Village, unless it belongs to someone who goes by the name Village Tee. In front of a store on the way to the glacial grooves, an outcropping of stone scarred from the last ice age, is a reader board with the letters arranged to say “UNC’L DIK’S.” There are so many things wrong with “UNC’L DIK’S” that I don’t know where to begin, but at least the apostrophe s at the end is right. I’m guessing that Uncle Dick bought an alphabet with only one of each letter, so he decided to distribute the C and the K equally between the elements of his name. He may have dropped the E in the lake, but he made up for it with an extra apostrophe.
Many of the houses on Kelleys Island have signs out front with the house’s name on them. One sign says “Our Secret Hideaway,” and I always think, Not anymore. Many announce the name of the family that owns the house, saying something like “Volt’s” when it should say just “Volt” or “The Volts’ ” (unless there is only one old Volt holed up in there, in which case it seems unlikely that he would advertise). If you are going to put a sign with your family’s name on it in front of your house, as if to say “Our House,” then you want the plural possessive: The Volts’. And if your name ends in an s you still want the plural, even if it looks terrible: The Norrises’. And if you don’t like it, simply refrain from putting a sign with your name on it in front of your house. And if someone else buys a custom-made sign for you with a mistake on it, the dump is on Dump Road, off Bookerman, in the center of the island.
All my ruminations on the name Kelleys Island turned out to be in vain. Kelleys Island did not suffer from apostrophe erosion—it had the apostrophe legislated out of it. The same is true of Harpers Ferry and Pikes Peak and Snedens Landing and St. Marks Place. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt instructed a government body called the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, started by Benjamin Harrison in 1890, to begin standardizing place-names, and the board determined that “the word or words that form a geographic name” undergo a change, losing the original meaning and becoming “fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities.” By official government policy, “the need to imply possession or association no longer exists.” Therefore the United States has what Barry Newman, in the Wall Street Journal, called “an apostrophe-eradication policy.” (The apostrophes in Irish names like O’Malley and O’Connor have been grandfathered in.) Martha’s Vineyard had its apostrophe restored in 1933, after almost four decades of deprivation. It has the eighth-oldest surviving place-name in the country, and, as with spelling in general, the name has history in it. Not that anyone is clear what that history is. The Vineyard Gazette traces the name back to 1602 and the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who may have named the island for his daughter Martha, who lies buried in Bury St. Edmonds, formerly St. Edmond’s Bury, in Suffolk, England.
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