We might as well start at home. Pumpkintown is pronounced pretty much the way it looks, although in a fast Upstate accent that middle sound can get swallowed enough that you may hear something closer to “PUNK-in-town.” Nobody is standing around carefully separating all three parts of the word.

Whether you carefully pronounce every letter or let a few disappear, this is the name at the heart of everything we cover here at PumpkintownSC.

If you have never seen this word before, we will forgive you for staring at it for a few seconds.

Oolenoy is everywhere around Pumpkintown. There is the Oolenoy River, Oolenoy Valley, Oolenoy Baptist Church, and the historic Oolenoy community.

That means a name that may look strange to a visitor is actually one of the oldest surviving names associated with the valley.

Pickens is not going to fool many people, but listen to a local say it and you will notice how relaxed that second syllable becomes.

It is usually not the carefully enunciated “pick-ENS” that the spelling might suggest. It is simply PICK-ins.

For visitors exploring this part of South Carolina, Pickens is also one of the most useful names to know. The city sits at the doorstep of the mountain country we cover throughout PumpkintownSC, including Table Rock, Pumpkintown, Nine Times Preserve, Eastatoe Valley, and the roads leading deeper into the Blue Ridge foothills.

Two syllables. Nice and easy.

Or should we say Easley?

The mistake here is trying to make the spelling do too much work. It is not EAST-lee and it is not Ease-a-lee.

It is simply EEZ-lee.

If you are coming from Greenville toward Pickens, Pumpkintown, or Table Rock, there is a good chance Easley will be part of your route.

Dacusville is another good example of what the Upstate does to words ending in “ville.”

On paper, you might carefully say DAY-kus-VILLE. In ordinary conversation, that ending gets softened considerably. DAY-kus-vul is much closer to what you will hear.

The rural community sits between Easley, Pumpkintown, and the mountains and has appeared in Pickens County records and newspapers for generations.

If you have never spent much time there, start with our guide to Dacusville, South Carolina.

Finally, one you cannot mess up.

The interesting part of Six Mile is not how to pronounce it but how the name became attached to this part of Pickens County.

According to the traditional Issaqueena story, a Cherokee woman rode to warn settlers of an impending attack and named landmarks according to their distance along her journey.

It is a wonderful Upstate story, although it is better treated as folklore than documented history. We explore the story in more detail in The Legend of Issaqueena.

This one is fairly forgiving. Put the emphasis at the beginning and you have it.

Modern Seneca grew as a railroad town in the 1870s and today sits in the middle of some of the most heavily traveled territory on PumpkintownSC: Clemson to the east, Lake Keowee to the north and west, and Walhalla and the mountains beyond.

But once you leave Seneca and start encountering the names of the lakes, rivers, and old communities around it, the pronunciation test gets considerably harder.

Here is where this list starts separating visitors from old-timers.

You will hear fuller pronunciations of Keowee, including KEE-uh-wee. They are not inventions, and you will hear them around South Carolina.

But longtime Seneca and Oconee County speech has a wonderful habit of throwing away the middle syllable altogether.

KEE-wee. Just like the fruit.

The modern reservoir transformed the valley, but the old name survived. Our article on what lies beneath Lake Keowee explores the communities, roads, historic sites, and older landscape connected to the valley.

Once you hear Jocassee pronounced correctly, it becomes surprisingly easy.

The emphasis belongs right in the middle: joe-KASS-ee.

Today most people associate the name with Lake Jocassee, Devil’s Fork State Park, waterfalls, clear mountain water, and the wild Jocassee Gorges surrounding the lake. But the name predates the reservoir by generations.

The creation of Lake Jocassee flooded a valley containing roads, homes, communities, and historic sites. Before the dams, the Toxaway, Horsepasture, Thompson, and Whitewater rivers flowed through this mountain landscape.

You can explore that vanished geography in Before Lake Jocassee: The Wild Rivers That Created the Keowee Valley.

Eastatoe might be the perfect example of why this article exists.

Look at it quickly and you might try EAST-a-toe. But the name stretches out one more syllable: east-ah-TOE-ee.

You will encounter Eastatoe all over northern Pickens County: Eastatoe Valley, Eastatoe Creek, the Eastatoe Creek Heritage Preserve, and several roads and natural features.

The spelling has also wandered over the years. Historical sources use variations including Eastatoe, Eastatoee, and Estatoe. That is not unusual for old place names that were written down by English speakers after originating in another language.

Today you can experience the area through places such as Eastatoe Creek and its public fishing access points.

Break it apart and this intimidating-looking name becomes easy.

izz – uh – QUEE – nuh.

Most visitors encounter Issaqueena at Issaqueena Falls beside Stumphouse Tunnel near Walhalla. The name is wrapped in the famous story of a Cherokee woman who supposedly rode to warn settlers of an impending attack and later escaped her pursuers by hiding near the falls.

That distinction actually makes the story more interesting, because it lets us explore both the folklore people passed down and what the historical record can actually prove.

Read more in The Legend of Issaqueena.

This one has a trap built right into it.

South Carolina has both Tamassee and Yemassee.

They look like they should rhyme.

They do not.

The Tamassee pronunciation has been checked locally through the Walhalla branch of the Oconee County Public Library for a statewide South Carolina pronunciation project.

The name itself goes back to a Cherokee settlement in what is now the Cheohee Valley. Historical records preserve several spellings, including Tamassee and Tomassee.

Toxaway is another name that reaches back much farther than the modern roads and communities carrying it.

A historic Cherokee settlement called Toxaway once existed in the greater Jocassee area. Today the old town site lies beneath Lake Jocassee.

That makes Toxaway part of a fascinating pattern. Look at a modern map around Jocassee and you are still reading names connected to a landscape that existed before the lakes, before the dams, and before South Carolina looked anything like it does today.

Our look at the rivers and valleys that existed before Lake Jocassee helps put that lost landscape back on the map.

If you have visited Chau Ram County Park near Westminster, you already have a clue.

The name has deep roots in Oconee County. Archaeological work has identified the Chauga site as the location of an eighteenth-century Lower Cherokee town.

So when you say Chauga, you are once again using a name that survived from the landscape that existed here long before today’s county lines.

Do not let all those letters scare you.

chat-OO-guh.

The Chattooga River forms part of the South Carolina-Georgia boundary and is one of the great wild rivers of the southern Appalachians. It is also another name deeply associated with Native history in this corner of the mountains.

If you are exploring waterfalls, rafting, fishing, or the backroads around northern Oconee County, you are eventually going to encounter Chattooga.

Oconee is another one that looks more difficult than it really is.

oh-KOH-nee.

The name is now attached to an entire county, but like Keowee, Jocassee, Eastatoe, and several others in this guide, it reflects the much older Native history of the region.

For visitors, Oconee County contains an almost ridiculous concentration of places worth exploring: Lake Jocassee, Lake Keowee, Walhalla, Stumphouse Tunnel, Issaqueena Falls, the Chattooga River, Chau Ram County Park, and miles of mountain roads and waterfalls.

Walhalla gives us one final twist.

The town was founded by German immigrants in the nineteenth century, and its name came from Valhalla in Germanic and Norse tradition. Historical accounts note that the town’s German founders pronounced the name more like “Valhalla.”

And every once in a while you may hear a particularly enthusiastic local pronunciation that starts drifting toward something like “Waller Holler.”