#41 Hog Eye
If there were an award for Least Likely Religious name, the Washington County town of Hog Eye would be a strong contender, especially since it was first called Moffit. There is an unbelievable tale for the name Hog Eye involving a visiting fiddler who played audience requests to earn money for whiskey. When asked to play “Hawk Eye,” he instead played a tune called “Hog Eye” that was so fetching, say the stories, that the listeners immediately changed their town’s name. A similarly unlikely tale says that a visitor proclaimed that the town was so small that it was “no bigger than a hog’s eye,” a unit of measurement not much used anymore. More likely is the less romantic but still intriguing guess that the town was named for the biblical prophet Haggai, with the pronunciation and spelling both morphing into the current name, that of the only Hog Eye in America.
Daniel Boice
University of Arkansas at Monticello