SEBRING, Fla. -- Highland County employees have quietly erased 'Niggertown Knoll' and 'Niggertown Marsh' from official county maps, using typewriter correction fluid to blot out the racially offensive names.
Sebring residents said they would ask the County Commission to officially ban any further reference to the old settlement on county maps.
The names referred to a Civil War-era shantytown and the adjacent marsh 10 miles west of Lake Placid, northwest of Lake Okeechobee.
The town is long gone. It was unclear how or why the offensive name continued to show up on the maps into the 1990s without a whimper of public protest.
But County Administrator Carl Cool said Monday he ordered the names blotted out last month after a black college administrator complained to him.
Cool said the cost to remove the names was minimal and only required having an employee spend the time to delete the words from official maps in use in county offices and from about 1,000 maps offered for sale to the public.
The maps available to the public are left over from a 1988 printing.
Sebring resident Ray Napper asked the commission to officially endorse Cool's alternation of the maps, arguing that the county was all but sanctioning racism by allowing the names to remain on official records so long.
But one county commissioner said the community is too much a part of local history and folklore to erase. She wants the names put back.
'I don't think it should be up to us to change history,' said Commissioner Audrey Vickers. 'There are all kinds of names out there that people don't like. Are we going to change those names too?'
Accounts are sketchy about what is supposed to be the area's first black community. Legend has it that freed slaves set up a shantytown that became known as 'Niggertown Knoll' after the Civil War.
According to one account, it was deemed a haven for thieves and horse rustlers and was burned to the ground by a white lynch mob around the turn of the century.
Another version is that the blacks simply decided to move on.
In any case, the shanties have long since rotted away and the roads are overgrown with weeds.
