Somerville
somerville
Old French
“Captain Richard Somers died at Tripoli in 1804, and Massachusetts named a city for him.”
The Latin word villa named a country estate with its farmland and outbuildings, the kind of property that dotted the Roman countryside from Britain to North Africa. In medieval French it shifted to mean any settlement, from hamlet to city, and entered English as the suffix -ville during the Norman period. Hundreds of American towns were cast from this mold: Louisville, Nashville, Jacksonville, Somerville. The suffix was especially fashionable in the early republic, when new municipalities wanted names that sounded both civilized and neutral.
The first element traces to a family name rooted in English geography. Somers derives from Somerset, an English county whose name comes from Old English sumorsæte, meaning the people of the summer pastures: those who drove cattle to high ground in summer and returned to valley farms in winter. By the time Somers appeared as a surname in medieval records, it had shed its agricultural roots and become simply a family name. Richard Somers, born in 1778 in Somers Point, New Jersey, had no knowledge that his surname preserved a cattle-grazing calendar.
Somers joined the new United States Navy as a young man and rose quickly, commanding the schooner Enterprise during the Quasi-War with France in the late 1790s. In August 1804, during the First Barbary War, he volunteered to pilot a vessel loaded with explosives into Tripoli harbor, hoping to destroy the Tripolitan fleet. The ship detonated before reaching its target. Somers and his entire crew of twelve men died in the explosion; he was twenty-five years old.
Somerville, Massachusetts was separated from Charlestown and incorporated as an independent town on March 3, 1842, thirty-eight years after Somers died. The naming honored the naval officer at a moment when American municipalities were in the habit of inscribing war dead into civic geography. By 1872 the town's population had grown large enough to warrant city status. Somerville is now one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, with roughly 80,000 residents packed into just under four square miles.
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Today
Somerville is now one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, a fact that would have surprised the Charlestown farmers who cultivated its hills in the eighteenth century. It is home to Tufts University, a significant arts community, and Davis Square, a neighborhood that became a music venue district in the 1980s. The name carries no trace of either the summer pastures in Somers or the Roman farmsteads in ville. Both etymological layers are invisible to anyone who has spent an entire life there.
Place names honoring military dead are common in American geography, but most of the honored officers are forgotten within a generation of the naming. Richard Somers is among the more obscure, remembered mainly by naval historians and the residents of Somers Point, New Jersey. The word Somerville has outlived any living memory of the man, carrying forward a surname whose agricultural etymology was already invisible in 1804. Names outlast the reasons they were given.
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