WOSU's Curious Cbus answers your questions about our region, its history and its people.

Dylan Olmsted wrote in to ask why the name Darby is so prominent in our area.

What is the significance of the name Darby?

We asked Aaron O'Donovan of the Columbus Metropolitan Library for the story.

Darby.

I just assumed there was a surname, so I started digging into it.

And the first reference I found of it was in 1905 when an article by Maria Martin, who suggests that the Derby name is Indian in origin.

She said that the two Derby creeks were named for an Indian as well as the planes that were watered by them.

But when I started digging into this quote a little bit more, there's no indication where she got this information from that it was Indian in origin.

Darby doesn't sound like an Indian origin to me.

So I started digging in a little bit more and I found an article in 1944 by a man named W.E.

Richmond in the Ohio History Journal, and he expanded upon that idea and he said, although the Indian in question called Darby must be must be a borrowed name from the invading whites.

But again, there's no attribution to where he got this idea from.

So that led me back to looking at maps.

So what I did find this map as far back as 1755 actually depicts the Darby Creek, but the creek is not named until 1806.

So in 1806, John Mansfield named both the creeks, the Darby Creek and the Little Darby Creek, except he calls them Derby Creek as a Derby hat.

So I wanted to figure out what the origins of Derby and Darby were.

And they come from the same root word.

Derby and Darby are both English in origin and its meaning is actually "deer village."

If you're a surveyor at the time, if you're seeing all these deer around this area, around this creek and you're from England and you know, Darby in England is deer village, maybe there's a connection.

It was in an 1820, Alexander Born and John Kilbourne, they call it Darby Creek.

They spell it the A.

The other thing I found interesting was there's a tool called a derby or a derby plain.

And it's a long flat piece of metal or wood that's used for plastering and or laying things flat.

Darby Creek is known for being around plains.

Plain City was actually going to be called Derbyville for a moment there, but they changed back to Plain City.

So I wondered if this derby plane too, has anything to do with it because it's such a flat area.

So the answer to your question is nothing is definitive about Darby Creek.

I could not find nothing definitive.

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