[A] lot of the Morristown residents who were asked to vote Tuesday on whether to change the town’s name to Morrisville never felt very strongly about the town’s name. While it’s confusing to outsiders, many of whom call Morristown Morrisville, for people who live in either the town or the village, either name worked just fine.
But on Tuesday, residents of the town of Morristown and the small village within it, Morrisville, narrowly voted to make the name of the village and the town the same: Morrisville.
According to unofficial results released by the Town Clerk’s office Tuesday night, 296 people voted in favor of the change, and 266 against it in a non-binding resolution.
For Win Cote, a former Morristown Selectboard member and former construction company owner, the issue did matter. He wanted the town to keep its name, Morristown. The larger area is called Morristown; the village is where the post office is located.
“It’s been Morristown for years,” said Cote, who was born and raised in Morristown. He said changing sign names, logos, stationary, and decals to a new name would cost a fortune. “I don’t know what brought this up,” he said.
A few of the people who attended Morristown Town Meeting or stopped by the municipal office to vote said they didn’t know for sure if they lived in Morrisville or Morristown; all the mail goes to Morrisville. Others said they were fine either way.
“I don’t think people think about it very much,” said Lorna Guy, who owns Guy’s Farm and Yard in the village, Morrisville. “The words are used interchangeably.”
Carol Lauber, who lives in Morristown, wanted to see the name changed to Morrisville.
“It has always been complicated,” said Lauber.
It’s not the first time a Vermont town has changed its name or done away with a name altogether. The town of Salem, on the shores of Lake Memphremagog, went through the same transformation 150 years ago, said Tyler Resch, the librarian at the Bennington Museum.
Resch, referring to a book about Vermont place names by Esther Monroe Swift, said that tiny Salem had its own post office and a population of about 300 until the mid-1840s. At some point, town officials in Salem and neighboring Derby discovered that Salem overlapped with Derby by about 6,000 acres, and that another part of Salem was under the waters of Lake Memphremagog, the 27-mile-long lake that crosses the Canadian border. Eventually, one part of Salem was annexed by Derby and another part by Newport. Now, the town only lives on now in local landmarks like Salem Lake and Salem Hill.
Also in past centuries, the town of Kent became Londonderry; Fulham became Dummerston; Draper became Wilmington and Bromley became Peru. Kingston was the original name of what is now Granville. And those are just the ones that came to Resch’s mind when asked; he said there were many more.
More recently, residents of Sherburne voted on Town Meeting Day in 1999 to change their town’s name to Killington, the name of the ski resort that is the area’s largest employer. In that case, voters were restoring the name given when the town was chartered 250 years ago at the base of the mountain called Killington Peak.
It’s not unusual for post offices, addresses, and town boundaries to muddy town identity. Christine Hayward, who works at Guy’s Farm and Yard in Morrisville, said she lives in Middlesex but her mail goes to Worcester. Another worker at Guy’s said he lives in Elmore and his mailing address is in Wolcott.
Down the street at Power Play Sports in Morrisville, Genica Breitenbeck said she lives in Cambridge but her mailing address is in Jeffersonville.
“It’s just a nuance,” Breitenbeck said. “It doesn’t matter.”
