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‘Dill’ is Canada’s waterfall; Sylva’s was ‘Dills’
Before our new publication even hit the street today (Thursday), we already had a call questioning our spelling.
That’s because we wrote last week about Sylva Herald photographer Nick Breedlove’s upcoming gallery show at It’s By Nature, which opens with a 7-9 reception Friday, June 30. Along with that story we included an image of Dill Falls, one of the featured locations in our new magazine, “Across the Mountains,” which is included with this week’s edition of the newspaper.
Kenneth Dills of Cullowhee called Tuesday to tell me that the waterfall is named for a relative of his, Ed Dills, and therefore should properly be called “Dills Falls.” We believe Kenneth is right about the origin of the name, because we got the same information from lifetime Canada community resident Leeward Hoxit when we asked him. Only thing is, the U.S. Geological Survey topo map for the Sam Knob quadrangle that indicates the waterfall labels it “Dill Falls.”
Lloyd Cowan loaned us this 1955 photo of Dills Falls, which was destroyed in the early 1970s during construction of the Sylva Bypass. The cascading falls had a total height of 249 feet and was located in the Dills Cove area.
We chose to use “Dill” rather than “Dills” for that reason only. It seemed logical to go with the topo map spelling because that was the only place we’d seen this particular waterfall named, and we thought it would avoid confusion.
The name of the creek that drops some 80 feet to produce the falls is another matter entirely. We’ve settled on “Tanassee” as the way we’ll spell it, though we could have just as easily chosen “Tanasee,” “Tannassee,” “Tannessee,” or “Tennessee,” because we’ve seen all of those and more. Most maps start it with “Tan” in contrast with the local pronunciation, which is invariably more akin to the way we say the name of the state that borders North Carolina to the west.
It’s sort of like Tuckaseigee. For some reason the post office in the community named after the river chose to omit the “i,” giving residents a Tuckasegee, N.C., home address. This newspaper is unique in that we distinguish the two, following the older name (Tuckaseigee) whenever we refer to the river, and the abbreviated one when it refers to the community and its churches. (One of Jackson County’s earliest newspapers, the pre-1900 Tuckaseigee Democrat, also preferred to spell its name with an “i.”) It’s confusing sometimes, but seems to make sense to us, especially since we’re writing about a county that has two schools with the same name spelled differently. There’s the high school – Smoky Mountain – and the elementary school –Smokey Mountain. (You can keep them straight by remembering “e is for elementary.”) It even occurred to us during the early 1990s search for a name for the school under construction in Cullowhee that school leaders could go for a three-peat: they could use the name again but spell it “Smokie Mountain.” Officials opted for “Cullowhee Valley” instead.
To return to the original topic, it’s also possible that those early map-makers knew the falls in Canada community could more properly be called Dills Falls but omitted the “s” to distinguish it from an early Sylva landmark.
Until the early 1970s, the town had a 249-foot waterfall, Dills Falls, and was thought to be the only incorporated town in the United States with a waterfall inside its city limits. The falls were located in the Dills Cove area and named, like the cove, for Jonah Dills, an early developer who owned a large amount of property in the area around St. Mary’s Catholic Church (Josephine, Bartlett and Brendle streets are named for members of Dills’ family). Dills Falls was destroyed during construction of the Sylva Bypass.
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