Old English place name meaning 'walled town' or 'settlement by a wall or forest'.
Walton is an Old English topographic name, built from the elements "w(e)ald" (forest, woodland) or "w(e)all" (wall) combined with "tun" (settlement, enclosure). The result means something like "settlement by the forest" or "settlement by the wall," and the name was attached to dozens of villages scattered across England, from Yorkshire to Surrey. As these place names hardened into surnames they followed English settlers across the Atlantic, taking root as a family name throughout the American South and Midwest.
The name's most resonant American cultural echo is The Waltons, the long-running CBS television drama (1972–1981) set during the Depression and World War II in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. 's autobiographical novel and the earlier film Spencer's Mountain — offered a portrait of multigenerational family loyalty and rural dignity that attracted enormous audiences. The closing ritual of characters calling goodnight to one another across a darkened house became one of the most affectionately remembered touchstones of 1970s television.
Separately, Walton is the surname of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, giving the name connotations of business ingenuity and American entrepreneurialism. Literary readers will think of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century English writer whose The Compleat Angler (1653) became one of the most reprinted books in the English language — a meditation on fishing that is really a meditation on patience, contemplation, and the good life. As a given name, Walton projects a sense of unhurried solidity and quiet ambition, a name with deep roots in English-speaking culture that has never quite been fashionable enough to wear out its welcome.