Crystal Valley: named in a blacksmith's shop for the clear creeks

A blacksmith’s fire is a good place for a town to start. Jared Gay set up his shop in this corner of Oceana County in 1861, on a wage of six hundred dollars a year, and the little settlement gathered around the ring of his hammer. When the place was ready to organize itself in 1865 and split off from neighboring Weare, the settlers held that first official town meeting right there in Gay’s blacksmith shop. No courthouse, no hall — just the smithy.

The name came from his wife. Catherine Gay looked at the streams threading through the low ground here, clear and cold straight out of the springs, and called them crystal. Crystal Valley for the hamlet, Crystal Township for the whole. It is one of those names you assume is real estate puffery until you see the water — these really are the kind of small creeks you can read the pebbles through.

The early settlers were a practical bunch with one soft spot. Dr. James Kitteredge came in 1863 meaning to give up medicine and farm a quiet patch of section sixteen. The neighbors would not let him. Sickness out on the frontier was constant, and folks kept knocking, and the kind-hearted doctor kept answering, so his retirement into farming never quite took.

What grew here stayed small. Crystal Valley never became a city; it has always been a crossroads hamlet in farm country, the post office long since closed, the blacksmith shop gone. But the township still carries the name a smith’s wife gave it more than a century and a half ago, for water clear enough that she thought of crystal — and the creeks are still running.