The (West Florida) area of Apalachi, and that which the Indians thought of as Talahasi, today’s Tallahassee, soon became an important source of cattle, horses and pigs for the Indians and the Spaniards. By 1675, the area was producing enough cattle, with the labor of the Indians, that the Spaniards were able to send 150 hides and 3,800 pounds of tallow (animal fat) to Cuba for sale. As for the ranchos, the Spaniards chose several areas where they gave land grants for cattle raising. One was near the mouth of the St. Marys River, another was in today’s West Florida. But the largest was what Maskókî speakers called chua – the little pot with a hole in the bottom. In this area, the karst (limestone) land sometimes filled up with water, but about every hundred years some lime rock dissolved, the water drained away, and the land reverted to prairie. The Spaniards added the prefix, la- and called it La Chua, and the later English speakers corrupted that, as they did so many other Maskókî and Hitchiti words, into Latchaway, today’s “Alachua” savannah.
From
Seminole 'Cowboys' in The Seminole Tribune
I came across this article when looking into Floridian cowboy history, this was written as a response to an article from NPR about the Seminole cowboys. I'm from a region that deals heavily in cattle farming, even my own grandmother has female cows kept on her property. When the herd is finished calving they're picked up by the fella who owns them and a couple of months later another group of a half dozen or so pregnant cows will be dropped off and the process begins again.
Now, I'm not directly from within Alachua County, but I've known plenty of people who were and have passed through it on countless occasions. But I remember the limerock; hauled in by the truckload to pave dirt roads and driveways in rural areas with the sandier soil of Florida's scrubland.
The word
chua, defined here as "the little pot with a hole in the bottom" refers to what is now commonly known as the Alachua Sink, located in Payne's Prairie. During some very rainy seasons, this sinkhole fills up and (rarely) becomes the Alachua Lake, before draining and making way for the Alachua Savannah. It was on this land where the largest cattle ranch in Spanish Florida was located: La Chua Ranch.
Some nonnative anthropologists claim that
chua is most easily translated to mean sinkhole, meaning that the Spanish were calling it The Sinkhole. This was translated phonetically into Latchaway by the English and then later formalized into Alachua.
Even further though, Wikipedia speculates that
chua comes from Timucua, a language of the Timucuan region (for which a nature preserve in the northeastern part of the state is named), while the tribune cites it specifically as coming from the Maskókî language, which is anglicized into Muskogee these days.
I found this all rather curious. Understanding the history of something, even something as seemingly innocuous as a name you have no memory of never not knowing, helps to cement it in history. This is a place that existed long before myself, my ancestors, and the state or country in which it currently resides. It also encourages one to reflect on the history of the people in this land, from the indigenous people who first gave it its name, to the Spanishization of La Chua, and the brief stint as Latchaway, and back to something resembling the original in Alachua.
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