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Correspondence from Charles E. Banks to Fannie Hardy Eckstorm ca. 1915-1930, Part 5

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�Nov. 30, 1930 Dear Mrs. Eckstorm

Sunday being Injun day with me, I proceed accordingly. I have a hill - in York. It is one of the few places in the town that still bears the remnants of a good Abnaki word. The modernized version of it - or rather the clipped version of it for two centuries - is Tonnemy Hill - various spellings. The lazy men called it that, but fortunately some meticulous person saved what seems to be the whole of it - Uannametonname - which strikes me as a decent thing to do. It rises 220 ft above sea level. Near by it are those fair sized ponds, one of which had the name of Tonnemy Pond - in various spellings - now called Scituate Pond from the Scituate man men who settled in York 1640 - about a half dozen of them. So far as I can see the word Wunnam|aton (over) eton| amy (e over the y) has nothing in it to connote a pond - and does have the gessarie tense for a hill. I suppose the prefix Wunnam (underscored) or Wannam (underscored) gives the suggestion of Wunne (underscored) signifying beautiful, good, though I fail to see why a hill should be either good or beautiful to Lo. in the abstract sense. Roger Williams gives Wunnan (underscored) as meaning the use of red paint by the natives, but I am not aware that such material was indigenous or near that hill. I do not know what they used for decorating themselves-possibly some sort of ferruginous clay or an iron oxide. It is rather singular that there are so few Indian place names in York. Neddick, Agamentics, Tatnick comprises them all. The real mountains, Agamenticus did not leave the name for us to wangle its remains, and some names of never were tagged with the name of a rock (Neddick)