This Bier Is Not Funeral-Related, Probably

The Allegany County community of Bier, population 173, is notable for its mournful name. As every undertaker knows, a bier is "a stand on which a corpse or coffin is placed" or "a coffin together with its stand," per Merriam-Webster.

Funeral bier, temporarily unoccupied.

Most likely, the place name Bier comes from the German surname Bier. The current county phone book, however, lists no Biers, only three Biermans.

Even better, perhaps, bier is the German word for beer, so whenever I drive through Bier -- on U.S. 220 midway between Cumberland and the Germanically-named Keyser -- I think of the song "I Love Louisa," from The Band Wagon:

How I love a glass of beer.

(More beer!)

Beer goes very good with beer.

(More beer!)

Alas, Hamill Kenny's otherwise invaluable The Place Names of Maryland is no help with Bier, which appears neither in the index nor in the alphabetical main text. Page 42 goes straight from Bew (Beau) Plains in Prince George's County to Big Pool in Washington County -- about which, more later.

Sources:

The Band Wagon. Dir. Vincente Minnelli. Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. With Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant. MGM, 1953.

“Bier.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bier. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.

"Bier (surname)." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bier_(surname). Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.

"Bier, Maryland." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bier,_Maryland. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.

Kenny, Hamill. The Place Names of Maryland: Their Origin and Meaning. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1984; 2nd printing, 1999.

 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Miss Effie's Neighbors? Out of This World

  Among the many colorful raconteurs Alyce T. Weinberg visited in the 1970s for her classic Spirits of Frederick was 94-year-old Effie “Miss Effie” Spurrier, whose matter-of-fact recollections of her life’s many hauntings are highlights of the book. Miss Effie viewed ghosts as commonplaces of daily life, like crossroads and churches, or rocks and trees. Consider her memories of the general store at Yellow Springs, in the Catoctin foothills about five miles northwest of Frederick: A big, fat woman ran a store near us up there. She always wore the same shirtwaist and skirt. I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead. We all said she must have hid money somewhere and came back to protect it. The dog that hung around the store saw her, too, and was so scared he’d lay down and tremble. “I saw her go in and out of that store after she was dead.” This chilling observation, so offhandedly presented, is a great example of what fiction writer Jeffrey Ford calls “the banal...
Read more

Mass Squirrel "Migration" Drove Folks Nuts

  This brief 1897 newspaper item may look like a tall tale, or evidence of some paranormal Pied Piper among Western Maryland squirrels, but it actually documents a well-known, now-rare natural phenomenon. Migrating Squirrels. As evidence of the theory that squirrels migrate, a novel scene was witnessed on Saturday in the upper portion of Washington County along the Potomac River. A drove of squirrels, of which eye-witnesses estimated there were at least three thousand, swarmed across the country. Their flight was soon discovered, and about three hundred of them were killed by men and boys. Periodic swarms of thousands of squirrels have been documented in North America at least since the Lewis and Clark expedition, and while they are popularly known as “migrations,” which implies a seasonal back-and-forth, they are actually emigrations, one-way movements from one place to another as needed – in the squirrels’ case, in search of food. Vagn Flyger, the late University of Mar...
Read more

Guardian Angel Foiled the Ku Klux Klan

  More than 60 years after the fact, longtime Allegany County resident Anton “Toni” Urbas (1909-1995) recounted that he would have been killed in the 1920s by anti-immigrant vigilantes, if not for divine intervention. This was during the George’s Creek coal miners’ strike of 1921-1924, while Toni was a young teenager, aged 12 to 15. It was a violent, lawless time, an opportunity for ugliness to emerge from the shadows, and Vale Summit racists had formed a new cell of a vicious group that was then at the peak of its nationwide influence: the Ku Klux Klan. While Toni often declined to name his long-ago tormentors – “What was to be gained,” he asked in 1988, “by creating another cycle of anger?” – he was quite specific about other things. A Klan ringleader, for example, lived in “one particular home on the Top Row.” And the Klan’s late-night Vale Summit headquarters was the kerosene-lighted sanctuary of the Methodist Church. “They would come to the meeting place under total dark...
Read more