Words About Words: Get Your Devil’s Strip off My Tree Lawn

by samclem

That strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road — what do you call it? I grew up in Arlington, Virginia calling it nothing that I can remember. When I moved to Akron some 40 years ago, I was mystified when someone called it the Devil’s Strip. Upon visiting friends in Cleveland, only 30 miles north, most had never heard it called that, calling it instead a tree lawn. When I polled people around the country, I got reports of terms such as parkway, berm, boulevard, verge, and a host of others. So, off I went in search of the history of the term. First stop: the use of “devil” as a no man’s land in the 1800s.

The term devil’s lane can be found from the mid-1800s in the U.S. It was used to refer to a strip of land between two farmers who hated each other so much that they refused to maintain a joint fence between their respective properties. Instead, each would build his own fence, leaving a strip of land between the two that neither maintained nor claimed.

Devil’s strip begins to show up in an urban setting with the advent of streetcars. While the streetcar companies were responsible for paving the area inside the rails, the area between the inbound and the outbound rails remained in dispute, with the companies suggesting the city pay for the paving. Thus, a no-man’s land. This term was still rather localized to Ohio, with scattered appearances in Canada, New York state, Iowa, and Michigan.

The first use of “devil’s strip” as we hear it today occurs with the advent of suburban communities in the 20th century. The term tree lawn also begins to show up with the suburban houses in Northern Ohio and some of its contiguous states.

As to why the term “devil’s strip” continued in the Akron area, I can only suggest that Akron has always been a bit slow to change. That, and the fact that many residents came from farming areas to take jobs in the rubber industry during WWI, bringing their slang with them.