Duck Village in Somerville is a unique location with an odd name. Where did it come from?

I searched the Globe archives and found the neighborhood name referenced decades before the start of Prohibition in 1920. An article published in 1885 begins: “A small portion of quiet Somerville is popularly known as Duck Village. How it got its peculiar name is a mystery.”

The sign seemed to be wrong, but the question was ripe.

I reached out to David Guss, a retired Tufts University anthropology professor and trustee of the Somerville Museum, who is also a 30-year resident of Duck Village.

In his home office, amid keepsakes from his time conducting ethnographies in Latin America, I asked Guss where the Duck Village name came from.

“There’s not any real agreement about where [the name] came from,” he said, however, it could derive from a time when the neighborhood was wetlands and “tremendous amounts of ducks would have been passing through on their migrations to other places every year.” What’s known as Millers River — today reduced to a stream under I-93 — used to be a definitive border between Cambridge and Somerville (then part of Charlestown) until it was artificially filled with land during the 19th century.

Even if the Duck Village name is just a reference to local ecology, it still tells a story.

“Once the trains came in 1835, the industry came to Somerville. Prior to that, it was very agrarian,” said Evelyn Battinelli, executive director emerita of the Somerville Museum. Brick makers, glass works, and metal tubing factories sprung up along the railroad, replacing dairy farms. Low-wage factory jobs attracted immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Greece to Duck Village.

“The people that lived there often worked in that neighborhood as well,” said Brandon Wilson, coordinator of events and education for the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission. “Most of the houses were built in the late 19th century, and certainly, they look that way. They’re small, a lot of them, and they’re not particularly fancy.”

Many of those homes still stand in Duck Village, which is only about five square blocks. They give the neighborhood a whimsical feel, as if someone waved a wand and warped the scale of Duck Village to two-thirds its original size.

There are other remnants of the old Duck Village hiding in plain sight. Across the street from Guss’s home is the last factory in a neighborhood that used to be defined by them — the metal stampings manufacturer Peter Forg, which has been operating for five generations.

These days, the neighborhood is “humble in construction, not price,” said Guss. Its geography makes it prime real estate. “We’re right in the center of all of these really active, interesting spots,” he said. “Union Square, Inman Square, Harvard Square, Porter Square: They all, sort of like a spoke, radiate around us.”

Continued development of the surrounding areas has some residents concerned that it’s only a matter of time before Duck Village is next. “People are very unhappy with the thought of our neighborhood disappearing. It is kind of a unique place,” Guss said.

When I showed him the photo of the sign that started me on this journey, Guss replied with familiarity in his tone, “Well, that was Frank’s.” He walked me a few blocks to a two-story, dandelion-colored duplex. The sign is absent from the home’s facade.

After Guss yelled his name a few times, Frank Cresta, 74, emerged from his home. We sat in the backyard, decorated with topiaries in the shape of ziggurats, columns, and sailboats. Miniature statues were scattered about. Elephants and lions, flanked by gargoyles and gnomes, were interspersed by likenesses of the Virgin Mary and the Buddha.

Cresta is a recycled art hobbyist who first displayed the homemade Duck Village sign over 20 years ago. His motivation to do so was simple: “I’m from Duck Village, so I put a Duck Village sign up.” It was removed for an equally simple reason. He never replaced the sign, which was “getting pretty shabby-looking,” after repainting his house in 2018.

Cresta is aware that his sign is “all over the internet.” He also already knows that the Duck Village name is older than he originally believed. Cresta couldn’t tell me how prominent bootlegging actually was in Duck Village (he pulled the sign’s wording from the internet verbatim). But Dan Breen — a legal studies professor at Brandeis University who has researched Somerville’s Prohibition-era history — was able to.

According to Breen, “Duck Village would have been a very convenient place to store alcohol” because it directly bordered both Cambridge, a dry city like Somerville, and the Fitchburg Railroad line, which allowed for quick transportation.

Although there is historical evidence that alcohol smuggling occurred in Duck Village, Breen doesn’t think the neighborhood had an abnormal relationship to bootlegging for a working-class, European immigrant community of that era, given the prominence of drinking in many European cultures. Breen also debunked the idea that pursuing bootleggers in Duck Village would have been uniquely challenging for police. “It’s not as if [the streets] are a spider web pattern that would frustrate all pursuit,” he said.

Though his sign wasn’t entirely accurate, Cresta himself is living history of a bygone Duck Village. In 1950, Cresta said, his Italian immigrant father bought for $5,000 the home that Frank still lives in. “This is where you went to live, or buy a house, if you had no money,” Cresta said.

Today, a newly constructed condo on the same street as Cresta’s home, and of similar size, is listed for $1.7 million.

As for the sign, it now sits on the ground in Cresta’s backyard, stashed behind a trash can.

The paint is chipped, some letters are missing, and two ducklings have disappeared. The sign, like Duck Village, has changed.

But its history hasn’t been forgotten yet.

Julian E.J. Sorapuru is a Development Fellow at the Globe and can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him @JulianSorapuru