Many Whitney-area roads named for residents

Pat Cassedy has lived on the same street in Whitney for most of his life, and eventually that street, Cassedy Lane, was named for him.

He has watched Whitney go from a little town on the road between Las Vegas and Boulder Highway to being absorbed by the valley's growth, until its edges are visible only on maps.

There were only a few roads in Whitney when the Cassedy family moved there.

They lived on the corner of a small road parallel to Boulder Highway that was originally called Desert Road and Whitney Avenue. Whitney Avenue was named for the town, which was in turned named for Stowell Whitney, the dairy farmer who owned much of the land in what is now the unincorporated township of Whitney. The town's first post office, on the corner of Whitney Avenue and Boulder Highway, still stands and is now the Accuracy Gun Shop. On the other side of Whitney Avenue was a small service station owned by John and Nellie Bunch. Nellie also served as the town's first postmaster.

"When we first moved here, there was nothing behind us," Cassedy said. "Then John and Nellie Bunch bought the property and subdivided it for houses."

Cassedy said John Bunch owned a primitive tractor with a blade on the back and cut the new roads out of the desert and graded them himself.

"They were originally named First, Second and Third," Cassedy said. "They weren't being very original about it. Eventually they renamed Third to Bunch because that was the street they lived on."

He added that First was changed to Dodd Street and Second to Willard Street around the same time.

"There was a lady named Dodd who lived on the street," Cassedy said. "She wasn't well-known, but she must have gone to the meeting where they decided that or something. Willard was the same way. There was a family named Willard that lived on the street."

The three streets are intersected by Keenan Avenue, which Cassedy said was named for Mary Keenan, who lived there with her mother and owned a trailer park on the other side of Boulder Highway.

"The trailer park is still there, across the street from the 7-Eleven on Missouri (Avenue)," Cassedy said.

The origin of the name Missouri Avenue remains a mystery.

Mark Hall-Patton, administrator for the Clark County museums and a consultant for the reality television program "Pawn Stars," wrote the book on Clark County street names, "Asphalt Memories," and is gathering material for a second book on the subject.

"The minute I finished 'Asphalt Memories,' I started finding the origins for a bunch of the names that had eluded me," Hall-Patton said. "I'm always on the lookout for more names, and it's always a pleasure to talk to people like Pat who were there when the streets were named."

The fact that Whitney was much removed from Las Vegas is instrumental in some unusual naming redundancy in two of the neighborhood's roads.

Whitney boasts Clark Street, while a downtown road that was part of the original streets laid out in Las Vegas is Clark Avenue. Even more confusing is Whitney's Nevada Avenue, which is unconnected and unrelated to an identically named street a little more than five miles north in Sunrise Manor.

Cassedy assumes that Clark Street and Nevada Avenue were simply named for the county and the state. Hall-Patton concurs that it seems likely, as many towns name streets that way and at the time, but that it falls into the category of probable but unproved.

For Cassedy, one of the most significantly named streets in his neighborhood is English Avenue.

"That was named for Mrs. English, who was our teacher at the Whitney School," Cassedy said. "I've talked to some of the people I went to school with, and we all think we owe her a lot because she was such an influence on us all."

At times, the number of students at the school was so small that eight grades were taught in the same room, with a row of desks indicating the grade, Cassedy said.

Leona English and her husband owned property on the other side of Boulder Highway, where the street that bears her name is.

While many of the streets in Cassedy's neighborhood are named for people he knew, one is simply a statement of fact.

"Bend Street was given that name because it has a bend in it," Cassedy said.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.