In Yadkin County, there’s a two-lane stretch of pavement with a name you won’t forget: Booger Swamp Road. For Carolina Curious this week, listener Alexi Foley asked for the story behind it. WFDD’s April Laissle found that the answer depends on who you ask.
It turns out, a lot of people have been wondering the same thing. A quick search on Facebook pulled up dozens of comments speculating about how the road got its name. One person came up again and again: Lark Williams, whose family has lived in the area for generations.
“My grandfather named it,” she said on a phone call.
Williams explained it stems from something that happened when she was a toddler. An elderly neighbor went missing, and everyone on the block was out in the swamp across the street looking for her, including Williams’s grandfather.
“She was hiding because she was scared, because everybody was hollering her name,” Williams said. “When my granddaddy found her, it scared them both, and they started screaming, and my granddaddy said, ‘There’s a booger in the swamp!’”
In this case, “booger” meant a bogeyman. Williams said she doesn’t remember exactly how her family got the road officially named, since she was only three years old at the time. So she pointed me to her brother, Niel Welborn.
“I'm sorry, but I have never heard that in my life,” Welborn told me.
He said he knows his father was asked to formally name the road back when the emergency response system was developed and the county needed street addresses. But he doesn’t remember their neighbor going missing at all, even though he’s several years older than his sister.
“Sounds like a good story that a father would tell a small child, don't you think?”
Then there’s another version of events — from Andrew Mackie, president of the Yadkin County Historical and Genealogical Society. He said the name comes from an entirely different local legend. It goes like this: when the road was unpaved, a man was traveling it on horseback on a dark, moonless night.
“And something landed on his shoulder, and he was terrified, and sped his horse as quickly as he could to his destination,” he said. “And when he got there and people asked what was wrong, he said, ‘Well, a booger was about to get me.’”
To complicate things further, it’s a story he got directly from Niel and Lark’s father, Max. He’s heard it repeated by others, too. He thinks maybe the true story is a mix of the two — that’s pretty typical as far as oral history goes. One thing is certain, though: the name continues to capture local imaginations.
“The most stolen sign in the county was the Booger Swamp Road sign,” Mackie said. “The county's had to replace it several times.”
You can see that now-famous sign for yourself; it’s just off Old Highway 421, west of Yadkinville.