Perhaps you can solve a place-name puzzle. Where does the name “Travilah” or “Traville” come from? Travilah Road connects River Road with points east in the Potomac, Md., area and is now the generic name for the area.

— Michael Rae, Potomac

Here’s what we know: In January 1883, a new post office was established in Montgomery County. The tiny settlement it served was west of Rockville, not far from the Potomac River and the C&O Canal.

The town was called Travilah, and it was named after the first postmaster, though not in the way that Answer Man expected. Travilah was not the postmaster’s family name. It was his first name: Travilah Clagett.

In the 1870 Census, Travilah’s father, Nathaniel, is described as “farmer,” with real estate valued at $4,500. (Like many farms in Maryland, Clagett’s fields were worked by enslaved people before the Civil War.)

Advertisement

Travilah’s five siblings are each listed as “At home.” The census enumerator chose something different to describe 12-year-old Travilah: “Crippled.”

It’s a jarring word. The boy was different from his brothers and sisters in another way. They were given familiar first names: Ida, Joseph, Lilly, Grace and Frederick. Where in the world did this outlier “Travilah” come from?

The word is seen in different incarnations and spelled in different ways when referring to the area or Clagett. (And his family name is occasionally spelled “Claggett.”) He appears as “Travilla” in some sources.

Answer Man can find no obvious antecedent. Could the name come from literature, a hopeful appellation for an infant who apparently was disabled from birth? In “The Three Musketeers,” M. de Treville is the captain of the Musketeers. Could the Claggetts have been such fans of Alexandre Dumas’s novel — first published in English in 1846 — that they named their son after one of its characters? But if so, why not choose Porthos or D’Artagnan?

Advertisement

A literary reference seems unlikely. Mrs. Answer Man pointed out that when an unusual first name is deployed, it is often because it is a family name from the mother’s side. Could Travilah’s mother, Anne, have had a relation who used that name?

There was a Phillip Travilla who in the 1820s was a Maryland state lawmaker from Kent County. Perhaps he was the connection, but barring the discovery of a family Bible inscribed with something along the lines of, “We christened our son Travilah, which we recognize is a weird name, but here’s why we did it . . . ” we’re probably out of luck.

Sally Simmons moved to the Travilah area in 1976 and lived there with her family for 30 years, before moving to Bethesda. Many old-timers were still around then, people from farming families who shared stories of the community’s early days with Sally, a writer. Sally’s children went to Travilah Elementary and in the late 1980s she started volunteering there. She put together a program for teachers and students that told the history of the place their school was named after.

Advertisement

“The thing that surprised me the most is that most of the parents didn’t really care,” she told Answer Man. “They weren’t very curious about it.”

Our suburbs weren’t always suburbs. Before mini-mansions stood along River Road, there were farms, a country store, a grange hall. And there was a post office.

Travilah Clagett died Dec. 13, 1883. He was 27 and had served as postmaster of his namesake town for less than a year.

A brief story appeared in the Montgomery Sentinel announcing his death. There’s a copy at the Montgomery County History Society. “The writer of these lines has known the deceased from his earliest childhood to the day of his death,” the obituary began, “and can truly say that in the course of a long life he has never known a more lovable character and one whose death is so universally lamented.”

Advertisement

The writer noted that though Travilah had been “born to suffering” and experienced much bodily pain throughout his life, “he seldom complained, but bore his suffering with great patience and resignation to the Divine Will. He was loved and sympathized with by all who knew him during his childhood and youth as well as in his more mature years.”

His name — inscrutable as it is — lives on.

Questions, please

Do you have a question about something in the Washington area? Send it to answerman@washpost.com.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmwr8ClZpqmo6yys3nMmqVmnailubC%2BxKxkraqRq7atrcdmoKdlnaS7tbPOppyrsV2YvLa607Jma2hiZXxyfI5pamibk2d9cq7Bb2RpbJRsenJ9xJtkm2%2BVmXpygJCdm3FwZWt9pq2%2BrKuoqqljtbW5yw%3D%3D