The “G” in G1 reflects the name of nearby Gris Road. Although the word gris is actually French in origin, and means “gray”, as in the color gray, the road name probably reflects the ethnicity of the settlers of this part of Indiana, who were largely Alsatians. These peoples came to the U.S. from the area in Western Europe called Alsace, which is in the high mountains west of the upper Rhine River. Interestingly, although the Alsatians were more often associated politically with the country of France than Germany, their language was Germanic. Over the formative years of European nationalism, the area alternated between being part of one then the other nation; this reflected on one hand France's nationalistic goal of creating defensible borders, and on the other rational German thinking about the matter: as one German historian and politician put it (ref. Wikipedia, Heinrich von Treitschke): “We Germans who know Germany and France know better what is good for the Alsatians than the unfortunates themselves. In the perversion of their French life they have no exact idea of what concerns Germany.” (???) It has been my personal experience, living in the Western U.S., that while lowland folks tend to draw imaginary lines along mountain ridges and claim their respective portions of the high country, peoples of the mountains tend to view themselves as different from the “flatlander” groups down below!!! (More on this phenomenon later...perhaps in G2, G3, etc.???)
I first encountered the word gris in French class in elementary school (I was part of a pilot program to start teaching foreign languages at a young age!!?), where I was taught it meant the color "gray". Through my studies I came to understand that French is a language rich in meanings, though, and in time learned that the word had other meanings, such as “drab” (as in an "overcast" day), and even “old” (as in "gray-haired")!! Also, as I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, one of the trends was to informally incorporate foreign words into our day-to-day language, and I occasionally encountered the word again: in one case where it was used to describe the “color” of an outfit in the fashion world in chic terms, another where it was used to refer to the weather on one of those really oppressively “drab” days. Myself even, reflecting such experience, was known to occasionally describe the weather on a grey day as gris (never used the other meaning, myself though!!). Finally, in drafting this narrative, I looked gris up on the Urban Dictionary website (as is my habit when investigating the etymology of a word -- as they used to say, “look that one up in your Funk & Wagnalls!!!"): the meaning offered by the Urban Dictionary, however, was such that I have no intention whatsoever of including it in this narrative!!!??
Overall, the above reflects on the difficulty one encounters in life trying to make clean cut definitions, or divisions, even in the most simple of matters: as a scientist and one who analyzes how things work by trade, I recognize this as the so-called “categorization problem”. Some might question if there is really a problem here or not, but in the end I must say that it is particularly through the effort to explore concepts and meanings at the boundaries that we gain understanding of the world around us!!!