New Haven, the Elm City, is really an Elm City. The 17,000 people living in Waterville, Maine, seem almost as eager as we are to slap their Elm City nickname on institutions, businesses, clubs and events, while the 23,000 residents of Keene, New Hampshire, use their town’s identical nickname even more interchangeably than we do, based on a review of local headlines.
You might want to know whether New Haven, being by far the oldest Elm City, has the earliest claim to the nickname, which could arguably establish our right to a the. In fact, the point is moot, thanks to a town of about 1,218 people in the eastern third of North Carolina, whose early residents gave it a name—not a nickname—that’s unique in these United States:
Elm City. The Elm City. And it’s not even a city.
Passing through Elm City during a road trip, I had about 90 minutes for a visit. My only planned destination was the Elm City Branch Library, where, aided by librarian Camille Welch, I hoped to uncover the origins of the town’s name. What I found was a 40-year identity crisis. Upon incorporating in 1873, Elm City was first christened Toisnot, after “an Indian name used to identify a swamp which is located to the west of town” (Wilson County’s Architectural Heritage, 1981). Then, starting in 1890, a group of tree-loving citizens mounted a successful campaign to adopt the name Elm City—which irked some other residents, who got Toisnot reinstated in 1895. Continued seesawing between officialdom and colloquiality created a “curious state of affairs” wherein, for example, “express and freight mail for Toisnot came addressed to Elm City”—until 1913, when the town adopted its second name for a second time, this time for good.
Contemplating that strange chain of events, I left the library to get the lay of the land. In 2025, as in 1873, a railroad runs like a spine through downtown, which now boasts a modest rib cage of six square blocks. Trains come through, but they no longer stop at the depot off the tracks’ western edge, which is now a community center. Boxy vintage buildings, some of them vacant and disheveled, and a dearth of foreground foliage lend a movie set quality to Elm City’s core, encompassing the library, the municipal headquarters and an antique bank building.
Judging by the density of nearby churches, Christianity dominates local spiritual life, though an Oh My Lard diner, a classic car collection and a sign for the Elm City Optimist Club suggest other devotions. At Elm City United Methodist Church, the sign outside anticipated the first question people would have about the church’s next community dinner: “Pancakes again? Yes!”
I didn’t have time to see things I wanted to—including the cemetery at the northern edge of downtown and the county-administered reservoir park known as Lake Wilson—and I didn’t get a chance to talk to any Elm City residents. Other than Welch, the librarian, who said she lived in neighboring Rocky Mount, I spotted just one local, and he seemed in a hurry, at least for the south, though he still took a second to give me a tip of his cap. I wondered whether, on an average day in Elm City, the busiest time isn’t the 15 or 20 minutes it takes for a long freight train to chug slowly through.
But you can’t know a place, even a very small place, in 90 minutes. I can’t begin to assess the extent to which Elm City delivers on its erstwhile promise of “Small Town Living at its Finest.” But I can still show you some of the lived-in, small-town Elm City sights.
Elm City, NC
~550 miles south-southwest of New Haven (map)
www.elmcitync.com
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was originally published on February 18, 2022.
