A name comes in handy when starting a club, even if it later needs to be changed. Many clubs use local geographic or political entity names in their club names, so I decided to join the crowd.

The Black Hills area has many interesting place names, starting with “Black Hills”. It is such an obvious choice that many firms use it. Indeed, when I searched the SD Secretary of State’s registered business name database it said there were over 500. There may be thousands of such firms! There already is the “Black Hills Soaring Club” in the Hot Springs area that could easily be confused with a “Black Hills Flying Club”. So that obvious choice was out.

After looking over the names of mountains, rivers, parks, and other geographic features, I narrowed my choices down to several that few or no businesses used in their names. My short list was thus:

Rapid Creek Flying Club
Pactola Flying Club
Sheridan Lake Flying Club

I ran these by some people on https://flyersforum.org and Pactola Flying Club was the only one to get nods of approval. For those who are into name origins, here’s what I found on several pages of Wikipedia:

“Pactola Lake is the largest and deepest reservoir in the Black Hills, located 15 miles west of Rapid City, South Dakota, … Pactola Dam was built in 1952 by federal authorities to provide Rapid City with a new water supply, following the related construction of Deerfield Dam in 1945.[3] The new reservoir inundated the mining town of Pactola. … The town’s early name, Camp Crook, was named in honor of General George Crook, who started his headquarters in the town. Pactola was chosen as the community name in 1878, when the miners were asked by lawyer and journalist H. N. Maguire to find a more interesting name. Pactola is derived from the ancient Greekplacer mining operations on the Pactolus River, an ancient river in Lydia. … Pactolus (Greek: Πακτωλός), now named Sart Çayı, is a river near the Aegean coast of Turkey. The river rises from Mount Tmolus, flows through the ruins of the ancient city of Sardis, and empties into the Gediz River, the ancient Hermus. The Pactolus once contained electrum that was the basis of the economy of the ancient state of Lydia which used the naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver to forge the first coins under Alyattes of Lydia. … According to legend, King Midas divested himself of the golden touch by washing himself in the river.[1] The historian Herodotus claimed that the gold contained in the sediments carried by the river was the source of the wealth of King Croesus, son of Alyattes.“