A little while back, the U. S. Postal Service bent a bit, and went against the grain of its own tradition to name the Hornell post office in honor of Lance Corporal Zachary Smith. Nineteen year-old Corporal Smith, First Battalion of the Sixth Marine Regiment, had been killed on January 24, 2010 while supporting combat operations in Afghanistan. He was the first Hornell combat death since Vietnam, and the post office now honors his name.

Similarly, the stretch of Interstate Route 390 between Exit 2 (Cohocton) and Exit 3 (Wayland) is now the Sergeant Devin A. Snyder Memorial Highway. Sergeant Snyder, of the army’s 793rd Military Police Battalion, was one of four soldiers killed with an improvised explosive device on June 4, 2011, also in Afghanistan. She was the first female soldier from western New York to die in the war.

War memorials are scattered across our communities, but the very names on the map often form memorials as well. The state legislature often honored heroes of the Revolution with county names. George Washington, James Monroe, Nathaniel Greene and Alexander Hamilton all crossed the Delaware in 1776, on the attack that in some ways was the turning point of the Revolution. Herkimer (Oriskany), Warren (Bunker Hill), and Montgomery (Quebec) were all killed in that war.

Schuyler, Steuben, Sullivan, Broome and Wayne were all generals in the War of Independence. Like Washington himself, Clinton, Israel Putnam, and van Cortlandt each served not just in the Revolutionary War, but also in the French and Indian War. (Van Cortlandt’s name was anglicized a little to give us Cortland County, and the Cortland apple for that matter.)

We can also see the experience of the Revolution if we zero in a little more closely on the map. The Dansvilles (Steuben and Livingston Counties) were named for Captain Dan Faulkner. Silas Wheeler and Robert Troup (Troupsburg) had each been P.O.W.s during the war. Colonel Arthur Lindsley got his name misspelled on the second line of his town’s founding document, and it’s been called Lindley ever since.

The War of 1812 was not very inspiring, and as far as I know only inspired one local name, which isn’t even on the map any more. Until the 1860s Franklin Street in Hornell was called Lundy’s Lane, presumably after the fierce 1814 Battle of Lundy’s Lane (Niagara Falls, Canada) in which local troops fought.

Curiously enough the Mexican War, which was not very popular in the north and in which local troops did little more than garrison duty, inspired a number of local names. The Steuben County Town of Fremont was named for “the Pathfinder,” John C. Frémont, a military man and western explorer who seized much of California when the war broke out. (In 1856 he was the first Republican candidate for president, and voters in his namesake town backed him enthusiastically.)

The small settlements of Sonora (Steuben County) and Monterey (Schuyler) remember significant Mexican War locations, while Buena Vista (Town of Howard, Steuben) spotlights a major victory for future Whig president Zachary Taylor. Young Hickory in Troupsburg commemorates Mexican War president James K. Polk, a Democrat, thus putting all three major parties on the Steuben map with Mexican War references.

After the massive World Wars, with gigantic death tolls, we were more likely to see general “war memorial” edifices (Bath municipal building, Corning stadium, old Corning library), but individual fallen were still remembered in the names of Legion posts and V.F.W. posts. I suppose that not long after the Mexican War, our local maps were pretty well filled up. There wasn’t much space for new names.