A local word is coming back, and it is older than I assumed. A small change is happening in how people around here describe where we live.
The word “Autuxit” is turning up again. A friend sent me notes about it last year. It showed up this week in a neighbor’s caption on a storm photo taken Thursday evening, August 27, as a severe line moved across the bayshore. It has been surfacing in conversation, in posts, in the casual shorthand people use when they mean this stretch of the Delaware Bayshore. Not everywhere, and not often, but more than it did a year ago.
My first assumption years ago was that somebody had misspelled a word, it landed as Nantuxent, and it spread from there. Some earlier input from a native American friend pointed out that the word Nantuxent might have evolved from another word but I chose to stick with it anyway for our branding. I presumed that Autuxit and Nantuxent were interchangeable. That assumption was wrong.
Autuxit is in the record
A compilation of historical records from Cumberland County states that the region around Newport was originally called Autuxit. That is not a folk claim. It matches the colonial legal land records.
Captain William Dare, who came from Dorsetshire in 1695 and served as sheriff and justice in Salem County, bought two hundred acres at Autuxit. He settled there and died there in 1720. The place he bought is the place we now call Newport.
Jacob Garrison sold off the last of a six-hundred-acre Thomas Budd tract in 1703 and moved to Turkey Point, which a family genealogy glosses as Autuxit. Garrison died between June 1708 and January 1709 and was buried at what became the Garrison Family Cemetery on Oranoken Creek, southwest of Dividing Creek, three miles southeast of Newport, northeast of Fortescue.
The name did not disappear entirely, either. A Garrison family history revised in 1986 carries the title “The Garrisons” from Autuxit. Somebody was still using the word forty years ago, in print, as the name of a home place.
So the current uptick in use is not an invention. It is a recovery, whether or not the people using it know that.
Nantuxent is the name that stayed
Nantuxent stayed on the maps. Nantuxent Creek rises in the marshes northwest of Newport, on the Lawrence and Downe township line, at the meeting of Middle Brook and Pages Run. It runs south, then west around Jones Island, past the Nantuxent Wildlife Management Area and Newport Landing, and empties into Nantuxent Cove. Five and a half miles of estuary.
Nantuxent appears on the standard list of New Jersey place names of Native American origin. A related form, Nantuxet, is recorded as the name of an Unalachtigo Lenape band, though sources place that band across the river in Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Are they the same word?
Probably. I cannot prove it, and neither can anyone I have read so far.
The Lenape had no written language before European contact. Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers wrote down what they heard, using their own spelling conventions, with no standard between them. The result across New Jersey is a mess of variants for single places. Assiscunk Creek was also written Assiscunke and Essiscunk. Mantua Creek appears in colonial documents as Manteskyl, Great Mantoes Creek, and Manto Creek.
Autuxit and Nantuxent sitting a few miles apart, both attached to the same small corner of the same county, both surfacing in the same decades of English recordkeeping, looks like two ears hearing one word. That is a reasonable inference. It is not a documented fact, and I am not going to present it as one. If someone has a source that establishes the derivation or the meaning, I want to see it.
What they are not is interchangeable
This is the practical part.
Autuxit named the Newport area, and by at least one account reached down to Turkey Point. Nantuxent names a creek and a cove that run north and west of Newport. They overlap at the edges. They are neighbors, not synonyms.
If the word is now being used as a general label for the whole bayshore, that is a broadening. Place names do this all the time and there is nothing wrong with it. But it costs precision at exactly the moment when precision matters. In that storm photo caption, “Autuxit” got paired with a reference to Goshen, which is in Middle Township, Cape May County, better than twenty miles southeast. A reader trying to work out where the storm actually was had no chance.
When we are describing weather, flooding, road closures, or property, the name has to point at a location a stranger can find.
Why I am writing this down
Naming is not decoration. A community that names its own places is a community that has some say in how it is described. When our coverage comes from somewhere else, we get somebody else’s names, somebody else’s boundaries, and eventually somebody else’s version of what happened here.
So I am glad the word is coming back. I would rather it come back accurately.
What I still want to know
I’ve always had a geeky curiosity about words. That leads to questions:
- Where is the increase in current usage coming from? If it is spreading from one post, one group, or one family, that is worth tracing.
- Does the Cumberland County Historical Society hold a documented derivation or meaning for Autuxit?
- Is there any surviving deed or survey that uses both Autuxit and Nantuxent, which would tell us whether colonists treated them as distinct places?
- Who has a copy of the 1986 Garrison family history, and what does it say about the name?
If you know any of this, tell me. Corrections welcome and credited.
