John Brown Canyon it is.

Not John A. Brown, the way the Oregon Geographic Names Board at first preferred it, but just plain old John Brown.

The board met Saturday in Tillamook to consider a number of proposed changes to place names in Oregon, and to revisit the name attached to the place in Jefferson County where U.S. Highway 26 approaches the Deschutes River.

The board approved the name change without objection, which it had planned to do in June but delayed because of a paperwork glitch, board President Sharon Nesbit explained. Actually, the board simply requested that the U.S. Board of Geographic Names approve the revised name. The change isn’t official until the national board signs off.

The canyon, since May 1986 officially designated Negro Brown Canyon, is named for one of the area’s first homesteaders and likely the first African-American to settle in Central Oregon. The Jefferson County Historical Society petitioned the state board for the name change, an application submitted by society President Jerry Ramsey and local historian Beth Crow of Madras. The canyon was known by a more vulgar version of the word “negro,” a racist slur that Ramsey hoped to erase by a formal change, he said previously.

He, like members of the state board, hoped to go one step further and add John Brown’s middle initial, A, to the official name. Turns out the U.S. board disapproves of middle initials, so simply John Brown will go up for approval. John Brown, besides being a fairly common name, is also more readily familiar as the name of a 19th-century radical abolitionist whose raid on Harper’s Ferry, Va., foreshadowed the Civil War.

“I sure wish they would bend on that and let us put in his middle initial,” Ramsey said Friday. “It would distinguish him from all the other John Browns. There are John Browns all over the map.”

A call to the executive secretary of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names in Washington, D.C., was not returned Friday.

John A. Brown of Jefferson County farmed a tract along Campbell Creek near its confluence with the Deschutes River. He arrived there in 1881, built a two-story home and after seven years of “proving up” the parcel, took legal claim, according to research by Ramsey and others. A mountain and creek in Deschutes County are also named for Brown, who died in 1903 and is buried in Prineville. Nesbit said she would like the board to meet in summer 2014 in Prineville and view Brown’s grave.

Ramsey said he hopes the publicity surrounding the name change may draw the attention of Brown’s descendants. They most likely do not bear the Brown surname, as John Brown had but one child, a daughter, whose given name is unknown, Ramsey said. He hopes the descendants might share their knowledge of their ancestor. Ramsey said he hopes one day to commemorate the name change at an event where the society could erect a plaque identifying John A. Brown, and his contribution to Jefferson County.