Yes, Woodstock is a
famous cartoon bird of indeterminate
species, named after a
famous rock concert. And it is the name of a town in
New Brunswick, and another in
Oregon, and still more towns in places like
New York and
New Hampshire and
New Zealand. Indeed, there are a great many towns by the name of Woodstock, because the name itself is a sort of a local
promotion effort. You might have noticed once or twice that a town might be called 'Oceanview' or 'Rolling Hills' or the like when the local
geography offers no such amenities. This is
advertising, pure and simple. Where settlers are wanted, names may be coined to suggest the desirable properties of the location wanting settlement. The entire subcontinent of
Greenland is named on such a premise. So are places like '
New York' (impliedly just like good old
York) and
Pennsylvania ('sylvania' evoking 'sylvan' or idyllically wooded), and every
Springfield (suggesting a
handy water source) which has ever been.
And what is a '
wood stock' after all? the name to modern ears seems to indicate a resource, a 'stock of wood' -- and in its Auld English origination, it referenced a clearing where such a stock of wood had been gathered from the forest, for the benefit of the king or lord. The implication is that the area cleared is yet surrounded by a plentiful useful resource. Name variants such as Wodestock or Wodestok are recorded as far back as
1086 in England's
Domesday Book, for the oldest continuing habitation of that name -- the one still found in
Oxfordshire, in the southeast of
England.
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