Allegheny Mountains - Name

Name

The name derives from the Allegheny River, which drains only a small portion of the Alleghenies in west-central Pennsylvania. The meaning of the word, which comes from the Lenape (Delaware) Indians, is not definitively known but is usually translated as "fine river". A Lenape legend tells of an ancient tribe called the "Allegewi" who lived on the river and were defeated by the Lenape. Allegheny is the early French spelling (as in Allegheny River, which was once part of New France), and Allegany is the early English spelling (as in Allegany County, Maryland, a former British Colony).

The word "Allegheny" was once commonly used to refer to the whole of what are now called the Appalachian Mountains. John Norton used it (spelled variously) around 1810 to refer to the mountains in Tennessee and Georgia. Around the same time, Washington Irving proposed renaming the United States either "Appalachia" or "Alleghania". In 1861, Arnold Henry Guyot published the first systematic geologic study of the whole mountain range. His map labeled the range as the "Alleghanies", but his book was titled On the Appalachian Mountain System. As late as 1867, John Muir — in his book A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf — used the word "Alleghanies" in referring to the southern Appalachians.

There was no general agreement about the "Appalachians" versus the "Alleghanies" until the late 19th century.