Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

This quote appeared on my computer screen within 24 hours of my reading in an old book that Boston was the hub of the universe, and in conjunction with an etymological note telling me that many placenames ending in –ton arose from the same root as the word town.

The city of Boston, Mass. is named after the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, England and popular legend has it that Boston is a development of Botolph’s Stone and that a saint named Botolph or Botwulf once preached his holy messages in that location.

If true that would have been in the mid 600s.

That famous document The Doomsday Book was written up after the Normans arrived in 1066 and was meticulous in its detail because it was intended to be an inventory of every piece of property—right down to the farm animals—in England so that the new French masters knew what to tax. Yet that very detailed inventory neglects to mention a town called anything like Boston.

Evidently Botolph did have a number of churches dedicated to him though, and so it could be that instead of Botolph’s Stone, Boston grew up as Botolph’s Town, being the settlement that accumulated in the vicinity of one of these churches.

In its most ancient sense town meant “an enclosed space” and as such was more likely to apply to a farm than an urban center. In some languages the related words mean “fence” or “hedge.”

It was the collection of buildings that accumulated on a farm that likely gave town its modern meaning. So places like Northampton, Sutton, Taunton and Wolverhampton were named originally after farmsteads.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests, everyone thinks that their particular town is the very best place to live.

I don’t live in Boston Lincolnshire or Boston Mass. but I do have some associations with the American Boston—my brother lives there for one thing.  A former mentor if mine was a Bostonian and it was from him that I first heard that Boston was the hub of the universe.

He went on to explain that the hub is that dirty greasy thing in the middle of the wheel that stands still while everything else goes on around it.