Pikes Peak has no apostrophe. Neither does Harpers Ferry. That is not sloppy typography on somebody’s map. It is a ruling, and since 1890 the federal government has approved apostrophes in exactly six natural feature names.
Getting to six meant going the other way on everything else. Hundreds of thousands of names were changed to make a single point about what a name is and is not. The reasoning is not the folklore version you may have heard, about a stray mark looking like a rock in the water. Whatever the board was arguing, it was willing to rewrite the map to say it.
None of this comes from a lone clerk with a rubber stamp. It comes from a committee that has been meeting since Benjamin Harrison was president and still meets on the second Thursday of every month. This past May was meeting 883.
