The city asked the public between Sept. 11 and Sept. 23 what to call the land it owns at 865 Fish Island Road, off State Road 312 with Mizell Road along its eastern edge, and sixty-eight people answered, sixty-five of them through the online survey, three by email and none by mail. Of the sixty-five who answered the first question, the one asking whether they agreed with calling it Stone Cutters Creek Park, twenty-six said yes and thirty-nine said no.

The recommendation going to the commission tonight, from a committee of the Public Works, Planning and Building and Communications departments, is Stone Cutters Creek Park. That is not a contradiction so much as a description of what the process is for.

Resolution 2016-15, which governs naming a city park, asks staff to accept public input, convene a review of it and offer a recommendation to the city manager, and it does not make the survey a ballot. The naming was requested in the first place by Vice Mayor Barbara Blonder.

What the name is for, and where it went

The city attached its own historical note to the item, written by its land management coordinator, William “JB” Miller, and it is four paragraphs that do more work than the survey did. Stone Cutters Creek was a tidal creek whose headwaters sat south of today’s Pope Road, and it ran north into the Matanzas, and it is on maps from 1777 into the early 1800s.

The reason the name is worth having is the landing on its east bank, which is where coquina quarried at the King’s Quarry, now inside Anastasia State Park, was loaded onto vessels for the Castillo de San Marcos. A fort gets built one boatload at a time, and that landing is where the boats were loaded.

Then the note gives two sentences that the recommendation itself does not mention. By the 1850s the creek was called Quarry Creek. And the creek was cut off entirely when D.P. Davis filled the salt marsh at what is now Pelican Reef, which backed water up south of the fill until a canal was dug to let it out toward the creek north of the Fish Island Marina.

So the commission is being asked to put on a sign a name that the people living beside the water had already given up by the 1850s, for a creek a developer later filled.

The thirty-one other names

The slide counts thirty-one name suggestions, and the city published every one of them with the reason attached, which makes the results document the most interesting thing in a five-hundred-page packet. Three wrote Fish Island Park, the only name suggested more than once, and the staff reason for declining it is on the slide: reference to Fish Island may prove confusing, because the Fish Island Preserve is next door.

The rest are an argument about whose century the sign belongs to. One entry makes the case for El Vergel Park after Jesse Fish, whose plantation on Anastasia Island ran, by that entry’s account, to around three thousand citrus trees with fruit shipped across the Atlantic, who died there in 1790, and who was buried near the house because, being Protestant, he could not be buried in the Catholic cemetery in town. Another asks for Gullah Geechee Heritage Park on the ground that this county is the southern end of the Gullah Geechee heritage corridor and that Lincolnville and Armstrong are the surviving communities of it. A third wants the park named for X. L. Pellicer and dates the request: 2027 is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Minorcan arrival in St. Augustine. A fourth makes a long case for Verle A. Pope, twenty-four years in the Florida Senate, whose name is on the 206 bridge and, the entry argues, nowhere a person would notice it.

Coquina Quarry came in, with the note that coquina is not technically stone. So did Escolta Creek Road, after the Spanish name for the channel, and Isla del pescado, and The Sentry Box Guard House, after the coquina ruins of the colonial guard post on the Fish Island plantation. A few of the thirty-one are jokes, and one is a complaint about county growth wearing a park name, and all of them are now a public record that will outlast whatever goes on the sign.

What the sign costs

The memorandum says that upon the final decision of the commission, staff “will design and construct a park sign to be placed in the area.” No figure for that work appears anywhere in the item, and no funding source is named for it.

The item is 10.A, under staff reports. The commission meets at 5 p.m. in the Alcazar Room.