In tracking down the origins of the name of Buck Snort, Tennessee, I have learned two things.
First, there is a Bucksnort, Arkansas. I have no details on that locality.
Second, there is a family named Pamplin who claims to have the skinny on the name. Their story is it was named after their Uncle Buck, sorta:
Bucksnort, Tennessee, got its name from William (“Buck”) Pamplin, a brother of McCager Armpstead Pamplin, my father’s father. Before the Civil War, William owned and lived on the site that later became Bucksnort.
It was like this: William loved whiskey. He would get soused to the ears with the sweet, smelly stuff, and when he did, he would roar and snort till everyone around heard him. They would say: “Just listen to Buck snort.” His snorting became so frequent and the comment was made so often, that the neighbors soon found themselves running the last two words together, thus the place was called Bucksnort.
In the course of time, a post office was needed. The Government wanted to know what name the community wished to be known by. Since William still owned and lived on the site, and since he still kept up his snorting, the neighbors and near-by farmers decided on Bucksnort. It was approved by the Government and the first post office and surrounding community became Bucksnort.
I note they spell the town as one word, while it was two words on the I-40 Exit 152 sign.
The town also appears to be a favorite of Russ Ringsak, one of the writers for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. See here, and here.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Did you find Bucksnort on a map? Here’s the link to the story of the town, which appears to have died out before the Civil War: http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/BB/hvbbs.html
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There is a Bucksnort Texas. I just found it with Google, while looking up the Bucksnort bar in Colorado.
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The better stories always seem reasonable.
Texas and Tennessee. My grandfather explained to me that many men of his generation left Tennessee for Texas, seeking … well I’m not sure exactly, but it was the place to head out for. He had cousins who did just that. We visited them once about 50 years ago (grand dad would have been 108 this year).
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Thanks for the information on the Missouri version.
Yes, I’ve heard a buck snort often enough — better than hearing a buffalo snort.
In a state like Tennessee, especially as I was, traveling back from a Scout camp named “Buck Toms,” a story that Buck Snort was a family name seems perfectly reasonable.
But, then, I live in Texas, where the city of Burleson isn’t even in Burleson County, and where we have a county named Deaf Smith.
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I gave you a pass the first time around. But two articles on Buck Snort … just can’t pass it up.
The Pamplins (or maybe their illustrious, if somewhat dubious forebear) sound quite the tellers of tall tales. You city boys always fall for it. Did they tell you any stories about snakes while they were at it?
Beyond Arkansas there’s another Buck Snort, a ghost town in Missouri. And I expect there were perhaps hundreds of locations given this local name but never elevated to official status.
An entry for Bucksnort Missouri (aka Richey) in Ghost Towns of Marie Co Missouri has the most reasonable, if somewhat more prosaic, explanation. It almost certainly applies to all those Buck Snorts.
Clearly, the towns were named for the particularly notable concentration of deer in the area. There were so many, whenever anyone moved the deers alarm sounds filled the woods.
Never heard a buck snort? What does it sound like?
A Guide to Night Sounds is reported to contain “the surprisingly (sic) snort of the white-tailed deer”. But is out of print.
And it seems recordings of deer snorting are only available from hunting stores, in the form of $90 special purpose deer-fooling audio devices. No thanks.
We’ll have to settle for text descriptions, like the one in the middle of this long discussion of hunting calls; “deer use the snort to see if the noise in the leaves is a deer or a predator”.
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