How much do you really know about Arizona? Leave it to Marshall Trimble – Arizona’s history guru – to compile these quirky facts about funky place names…

• Gouge-em, Hog-em and Stink-em were suburbs of Tombstone in the late 1870s.
• Lousy Gulch,  a suburb of Payson, got its name after all three residents – Ben, Elmer and Link Cole – got lice
• The town of Total Wreck got its name because of an outcropping of silver ore looked like a total wreck.
• Mistake Peak viewed from the Tonto Basin looks to be part of a main range but when viewed from the opposite side it looks like a separate peak.
• No Name Mesa on the AZ-Utah border actually has a name….No Name.
• Kim, Arizona is named for Epes Randolph, the president of Southern Pacific Railroad’s Chinese cook. Kim had never visited his “town” along the SP line in Yuma County so Randolph arranged to drop him off for a visit. Kim got off the train to take a look around the bleak surroundings. His arrival increased the population to one. Randolph signaled the train to leave him behind. Another train was arranged for the next train to pick him up. When they met at the next stop Randolph asked him what he thought of his town and Kim replied, “Fine! Fine! It still has lots of room to grow.”
• Arizona’s first mobile home was housed by William Hardy whom Hardyville on the Colorado was named for. He drug a steamboat’s cabin ashore and took up residence in it.
• Tombstone, “The Town Too Tough To Die,” used to have a beauty shop called “The Curl Up and Die.”
• The largest family living in Strawberry, Arizona was named Peach. Tuffy Peach was the last pony express rider. He carried the mail from Camp Verde to Strawberry, Pine and Payson from 1910 until 1914.
• For many years the town of Nothing, population four, had a saloon called the “Ain’t Much.” It burned in 1988 and for a while there was nothing in Nothing.
• Liberty, Arizona was originally called Toothaker Place, not because of bad water but for the Toothaker family who farmed there. It was changed to Liberty during the patriotic fever of World War I.
• Out in the bleak desert of western Arizona is a town called Hope. Living there doesn’t dampen the spirit of its residents. They erected a sign on the way out of town that says, “If you can read this, you’re beyond Hope.”
• South of Prescott is a small community named Nowhere. The biggest problem facing the resident’s is do they spell it No Where or Nowhere.
• When the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison closed in 1909 it was empty until a year later when the Yuma High School burned down. For the next several years the inmate, er, students attended classes in the old prison. Yuma High’s students renamed their mascot the Horned Frogs, changing it to “Criminals.”