The Oregon Geographic Names Board met Saturday in Eugene to consider one of the few applications it’s received to recommend changing a place name that originates with an African-American.

In this case, a canyon in Jefferson County named for one of the first documented homesteaders, and likely the first African-American, to settle in that area, John A. Brown. The board president, Sharon Nesbit, described this act as a long-overdue correction.

“That’s probably, in my view, the most interesting thing we have coming up,” she said Friday. “It partly vindicates a lot of old injustices.”

The board did not approve the application Saturday but returned it to correct technical errors in the paperwork. Nesbit said the application should be submitted as a name change, not as a new name, but she said the board found merit in the application. The board also wanted to include Brown’s middle initial in the name of the canyon, but generally looked favorably on the name change.

The canyon itself is well known to anyone who’s driven U.S. Highway 26 to Portland. The highway dips into the canyon along its north side before descending to and crossing the Deschutes River north of Madras. Westbound travelers have a view of Mount Jefferson in the distance as the blacktop ribbon drops below the rimrocks four miles to the river below.

The canyon was for years known locally by a racial slur for African-Americans, a word that begins with “n,” combined with the name Brown and canyon. It disappeared from maps long ago, if it ever appeared on any, but continued in use until the baby boom generation.

Local historian Jarold “Jerry” Ramsey, who grew up on a ranch atop the canyon, said he recoiled from the name as a child. “We knew it (by that name) informally, and I protested to my dad that that’s not right,” Ramsey said. “And he said, ‘I agree.’”

After a career teaching university-level English in New York, Ramsey returned to the family ranch, where he lives today. His own children spent summers there and registered their own complaint: “’Dad, that’s unacceptable,’” he said.

Ramsey, the president of the Jefferson County Historical Society, and Beth Crow of Madras, a retired teacher, together authored the 7-page application to officially designate the place John Brown Canyon. The historical societies of Jefferson and Crook counties supported the application. Brown, who died in 1903, is buried in Prineville.

The Oregon Geographic Names Board, one of the most active in the nation, makes recommendations to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, a division of the U.S. Geologic Survey. The U.S. board makes the final determination, usually in about six months, Nesbit said.

She said the U.S. board some time ago erased many place names derived from racial and ethnic slurs, but in so doing also erased the memory of those for whom those features were named. Restoring an official designation absent the slur restores the memory of a Central Oregon pioneer.

“The tragedy is these people are known mostly by their color, not their first name,” Nesbit said.

She recalled only one other site named for an African-American that the board renamed, a creek in western Oregon the name of which was changed 10 or 15 years ago.

John A. Brown, according to Ramsey, arrived from Polk County in 1881 and settled at the bottom of the canyon, below present-day Pelton Reservoir.

“He was probably the first homesteader in this locale, and likely the first African-American homesteader in Central Oregon,” according to the application.

He built a two-story home, and he and his wife raised livestock and produce for sale in Prineville. He “proved up” his homestead claim and took title to it in 1888. He irrigated his vegetables from Campbell Creek, which flows through the canyon, and grew fruit trees along its banks, Ramsey told the Madras Pioneer newspaper.

The creek is named for a family of pioneers to whom Brown sold part of his homestead. The creek will keep the Campbell name, Ramsey said.

Other than oral accounts Ramsey has collected, little else is known of Brown, other than he and his wife had a daughter in 1886, the wife and daughter left unnamed in a Prineville newspaper report. “What happened after he left his place in the canyon is a real mystery,” Ramsey said.

Brown left the homestead around 1888 and turned up in census records in the so-called Ireland precinct, near La Pine, where he may have been a prospector. He apparently was divorced by 1900, according to Ramsey. In Deschutes County, a creek and a mountain are named for him, according to the Crook County Historical and Genealogical Society.

The application to name John Brown Canyon is one of six new name proposals from around the state on the board agenda. More of the board’s time is taken up with an avalanche of proposals to change the names of geographic features around Oregon that bear the name “squaw.”

Native Americans find the name offensive and often submit replacement names they report were originally attached to those places. By contrast, the descendants of pioneers and others “don’t believe it’s necessary to get rid of squaw names,” or suggest names that bear upon pioneer history or other usage, according to Nesbit and board records.

“This is our most difficult period right now because of the issue of ‘squaw’ names,” she said. “At this meeting we have nine counter-proposals from Grant County.”

“It gets heated,” Nesbit said.