On the very day of our press conference celebrating the City Parks Alliance naming Tattnall Square a Frontline Park, we find ourselves, dear park lovers, in a most grave and aged controversy that strikes at the heart of the very notion of Tattnall Square Park: its spelling. Someone has been repeatedly calling the Mayors office, the major news outlets, and taking to Twitter to decry what he believes to be an erroneous spelling of the Tattnall in our parks dear name. He insists that the proper spelling is Tatnall, citing our own playground sign and Tatnall Street nearby, along with common 1970s-80s spelling of the name. We love people who love the parks great history here, but perhaps nothing in our parks history is so confusing as the history of its name. Bear with me. The park was named after Josiah Tattnall. Nobody disputes this. And nobody disputes the spelling of his name, which has always had three ts and two ls. Clear as day, right? Well, except that pesky map-makers sometimes miss a detail or two. The first maps in 1854 and 1873 misspell the name Tatnall, while the Macon Telegraph has spelled the parks name both Tatnall and Tattnall from the 19th century. In the early twentieth century, the last Tattnall Square Improvement Association--the group that brought us the first and only master plan ever fully realized in the park--deliberately chose the Tattnall spelling, which the Telegraph dutifully reproduced in 1914 (Tattnall Square to be a Perfect Little Gem one headline reads). And for a while, there was peace. But Tatnall would not die, and again arose in the mid-twentieth century, when there were dueling names vying for these 16 acres (ok, ok, it could be slightly less than 16, but thats another debate altogether). Finally, Nancy Lewis of the Macon News rode to the rescue in 1972 and set the record straight forever. In her watershed article Tattnall: A Decline in Spelling, she carefully reconstructed the history. Her conclusion? It is T-A-T-T-N-A-L-L. Not Tatnall or Tatnell or Tattnal or any other variety of combinations that have been used since Josiah Tattnall Jr. died in 1802. After noting that other parts of Georgia dont exhibit these same spelling errors (Tattnall County and Tattnall Prison), she writes: the thing that makes it so embarrassing for history buffs and perfectionists is the fact that the Tattnall family played an important role in the development of Georgia, both as a colony and as a state. Though we as an organization are far more concerned about creating a beautiful public park than we are in our extra T, history does matter to us, and so we have chosen to spell Tattnall after the man for whom the park was named. (I really wanted to end that with a preposition, but Anya Silver might read this. . . ok, who am I kidding? Theres no way Anya will read this). Whoever this person is, though, we can use his enthusiasm for the park and its history. And its certainly understandable, given the bizarre history and the many spellings of the park over the years (and the Street), that hed have been convicted of the correctness of Tatnall. The variant misspelling is, after all, a part of the parks history.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 21:11:00 +0000