Students from G.A.R. Memorial Middle School in Wilkes-Barre talk about the proper pronunciation of the city’s name on Public Square on Wednesday. They said they learned about the history of the name from City Councilman and Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society director and curator Tony Brooks — who will tell you that the second word sounds like ‘berry.’
Roger DuPuis | Times Leader
History reveals a correct answer, but variations and debate persist
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Wilkes-Barre Mayor George Brown signs his name on a notepad at his desk in City Hall this week. A native of the city, Brown is firmly in the ‘berry’ camp when it comes to pronouncing the community’s name.
Roger DuPuis | Times Leader
This 1861 check issued by what was then Wilkes-Barré Borough shows the accent aigu at the end of the city’s name, reflecting how namesake Isaac Barré spelled his name.
Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society collection
A Chamber of Commerce brochure from 1920 shows Wilkes-Barré spelled with the accent aigu for all the world to see. Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society director and curator Tony Brooks said a 1920 jingle promoted by the chamber emphasized that the second part of the name should sound like ‘berry.’
Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society collection
Brooks
WILKES-BARRE — You probably think you know how to pronounce the name of Luzerne County’s largest city.
You may think “this isn’t even a story.”
Some in our newsroom said exactly that. Then they proceeded to pronounce it three different ways. And we’re talking about a group of locals here. (Well, if you accept Plymouth and West Pittston folks as local, considering that they’re from way over on the other side of the Susquehanna. And then there was the one from Scranton. Scranton! Who even gave them a say?)
Then we went out onto Public Square with a crew from our partners at Eyewitness News.
As WBRE/WYOU’s Chris Bohinski put it: “Eleven letters, made from two names, separated by a hyphen. Sounds simple, right?”
No.
The pronunciations varied, as did people’s certainty about what they were saying. Some even changed their minds as the discussion progressed.
And, as it turns out, this debate has been going on for over 200 years.
But there is a correct answer. Sort of.
It’s not “bear,” “bar,” or “barra.”
It’s “berry.”
And that’s only because most Americans historically would have struggled with “ba-rrray,” and its throaty French rolling of the Rs, as the name would have sounded in the Barré family’s ancestral tongue.
That probably won’t settle things for some people, but at least let us explain.
Messrs. Wilkes and Barré
For those who don’t already know, Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1769, when the region was still claimed by Connecticut and part of the British Empire. Its namesakes are the Rt. Hon. John Wilkes and Isaac Barré, members of the British Parliament who were sympathetic toward the American colonists.
Wilkes, arguably the more famous of the two, was a London-born radical who spent much of his younger life antagonizing the establishment, earning the enmity of King George III and other high-ranking members of British society.
Barré, meanwhile, was born in Dublin, Ireland to French Huguenot refugees. Despite his French roots, he was raised in Anglo-Irish society, served in the British Army, and later became a member of Parliament. There, Barré was an ardent supporter of the American cause.
Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society director and curator Tony Brooks, who has spent many years studying the issue, said we cannot know for sure how Barré pronounced his own name, but that even in his own time it likely would have been anglicized by the people around him in Ireland and England, sounding more like “berry” than “ba-rrray,” despite continued use of the accent aigu (é) over the e. In French, that letter sounds like “ay” or “eh.”
So, how would Wilkes-Barré have been pronounced in early America?
Brooks has found evidence that battles over the spelling and pronunciation go way back.
In 1829, the Wyoming Bank of Wilkes-Barré passed a resolution at the time of its founding that specified spelling as you see here, complete with hyphen, capital B, and the accent aigu over the e, to point to what they saw as its proper pronunciation. That, he said, suggests that the spelling and pronunciation were controversial even then, 60 years after the community was first formed.
The é persisted into the 20th century. Brooks pointed to several instances, including a check issued by the then-Borough of Wilkes-Barré in 1861 (attached to this story), as well as by many businesses and organizations.
So many spellings
That was hardly the end of the matter, however.
Spellings of the community’s name had always varied widely. As the Times Leader noted in a 2001 piece on this subject, Maj. John Durkee and the small group of settlers who came to the Wyoming Valley from Connecticut in 1769 called their town Wilkesbarre. “Merging town names was common in England. Names such as Newhaven, Easthampstead and Westfield cover the British landscape,” the 2001 story noted.
But consistency proved elusive: Under a 1799 state act that set local borders, the name was printed “Wilkes-barre,” and written “Wilkesbarre,” the story added.
Over the years, the name appeared with and without the é, sometimes even as one word, Wilkesbarre, Wilkesborough or even Wilkesbury — the bank’s 1829 resolution be damned. But by the late 1800s, Wilkesbarre seemed to find broad favor again, including with the U.S. Post Office.
Some locals resisted, and felt that the name needed to be hyphenated and include the capital B to properly honor both namesakes. Brooks said this feeling intensifed as the community geared up for 1906, when the centennial of its 1806 elevation to borough status would be commemorated (it became a city in 1871).
The effort succeeded. President Theodore Roosevelt was approached by residents during an August 1905 visit and decreed soon after that all government departments would write “Wilkes-Barre.”
The hyphen was in, the é was out, and the pronunciation was still anyone’s guess.
However, prominent local historian Oscar J. Harvey — a source to whom Brooks frequently turns — was a supporter of the accent and French pronunciation.
“The variations seem to have driven Oscar Harvey nuts,” Brooks said with a laugh.
Harvey was not alone. Indeed, a 1920 Chamber of Commerce publication attached to this story shows the name with the accent. However, Brooks pointed out, in the same decade the Chamber also published a jingle stating “It’s Wilkes-Barre as in strawberry,” which is certainly less French.
Brooks said the accent started to disappear in the 1930s and ’40s and was all but dead in the post-World War II years.
One notable exception was the Times Leader, which used it in the paper’s nameplate well into the 1970s.
A rose by any other name
The people we chatted with on and around Public Square offered the usual variations: “bear,” “bar,” “barra,” or “berry.”
Even Bohinski, a native of Wilkes-Barre Township who has always said “berry,” admits his own father sometimes said “bear.”
One group of G.A.R. Memorial Middle School students we encountered on the square admitted that they, too, used to vary in their pronunciations, until they took a tour with Brooks and learned the name’s history and proper pronunciation.
“Wilkes-BERRY” they shouted in unison.
Mayor George Brown, a lifelong resident, agreed.
“We have people mispronounce it all the time,” Brown said. “We’ve had people perform at the F.M. Kirby Center and pronounce it the wrong way. I’ll stand up and say, ‘hey, I’m the mayor, and it’s Wilkes-BERRY.”
All are welcome regardless, he added.
“Whether you call it Wilkes-BERRY or Wilkes-BAR or Wilkes-BEAR, come on out, because it’s a great city,” Brown said.
