How the English Named New England

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The land that is now the United States once had no name. Fifteen thousand years ago or so, humans showed up and began naming things. Then, 400 years ago, more humans showed up and named them again. They were mostly English. This is the story of how the English named New England, or at least much of it, in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries.

Natives had already scattered names along the eastern coast of North America when the colonists arrived. They didn’t always name the same things the colonists did. They did name places they visited often, and places that served a purpose – like a river full of fish.

Indians used descriptions to name landmarks, such as “river by oak trees” or “stream with beaver dams.” Sometimes they associated landmarks with legends. For example, the Abenaki spun the tale of the giant Glooscap. He once chased a moose to the seashore in what is now called Cape Rosier in Brooksville, Maine. Glooscap killing the moose on the shore. They called a rock that looked like a moose’s rump “Moos-i-katch-ik.” Glooscap then threw the entrails to his dog, reddening a rock they called Osquon, the liver. They named a vein of white quartz, Oolaghesee, “the gut.”

What the English Named

Two things the Natives didn’t name: provinces and tribes.

The colonists made the mistake of using Native place names as tribal names. The people who lived in Nauset were the Nauset tribe, the colonists thought—but that’s not what the Natives thought.

Then the colonists took the names and mangled them. They wrote down the sounds they thought they heard, but the Native languages had sounds the English didn’t know. The English also didn’t standardize spelling and put together letters according to whim.

So the English version of an Indian name is a doubtful – and fluid — replica of the Indian name. Merrimack was Monumac and Molumac. Winnipesaukee had at least 132 different spellings.

Many Indian names were quite long, so the colonists shortened some of them. But not all. People from Webster, Mass., like to show off their ability to say, “Lake Chaubunagungamaug,” believed the lonest one-word place name in the United States. Some just call it Lake Webster. (One does wonder how many different ways people have spelled it over the years.)

Why the English Named American Towns After English Towns

Explorer John Smith named New England. He sailed to the coast of what was then called Northern Virginia from Chesapeake Bay. Smith mapped it, using his version of Indian names, but he didn’t like Northern Virginia. He didn’t like the other names people had called it either, like Norumbega, Nuskoncus, Penaquida and Canada.

Smith hit on “New England” and wrote a book about his travels there, with a map. The book sold well. Six years later, King James granted the land in a charter in which he wrote, “The name shall be called by the name New England in America.”

Smith used the Indian names to denote landmarks, settlements and big rivers. He also took an Indian name meaning “big-hill-people” and turned it into Massachusetts.

Some of the other Indian names on the map seemed barbarous to him. So he had an idea. He decided to flatter Charles Stuart, the heir to the throne, by asking him to change the names, thus making his mark on the New World. Smith sent him the map and asked him to come up with new names.

Charles liked Smith’s suggestion and renamed about 35 places after English towns. He turned Sowocatuck to Ipswich, Passtaquack to Hull, Accomack to Plymouth, and so on. It’s only a folk tale, by the way, that the Pilgrims named Plymouth. The town already had the name Prince Charles had given it.

Before Smith had turned the map over to the prince, he changed a few things as part of his charm offensive. He gave the royal family’s names to certain geographical features. Smith named the Charles River after the prince, Cape Elizabeth after his sister and Cape Ann after his mother. He also named Cape James after Charles’ father, but that name didn’t stick. It turned into Cape Cod when another English explorer went fishing there.

More Towns Get Named

The English colonists followed Charles’ example of naming towns for English municipalities. Settlers in unincorporated places could call them what they wanted until they incorporated. Then they had to take the name of the English town the legislature gave them. In Massachusetts, though, Marblehead was originally named for its rocky headlands, the English calling all hard rock “marble.” The fishermen who settled Marblehead had little use for the Puritanical niceties of the Massachusetts General Court. Marbleheaders refused to change their name, and lawmakers backed down in the face of their resistance.

Marblehead provides the exception to prove the rule. Today, Massachusetts has at least 104 English names for cities, towns and counties, starting with Amesbury and ending with Yarmouth. Maine has 32, Connecticut 31, Vermont, 36, and New Hampshire has 47. Rhode Island, always the rebel, only has 15. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, since Roger Williams named his settlement after “God’s merciful Providence” and not some burg in England.

Connecticut Makes a Break

Connecticut first broke with the naming tradition in 1695 when it gave a new town the Biblical name of Lebanon.

(One could argue it had already strayed in 1636 when it named Saybrook, a hybrid of the names of Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brook, two men entitled to the land by virtue of a charter from the Earl of Warwick. But Saybrook had been a separate colony.)

Things went further in 1702 when Mansfield took its name from a major landowner, Major Mansfield. Then in 1708, a group of men who’d volunteered in King Philip’s War received land for their efforts. They formed a town and coined a name for it, Voluntown.

Massachusetts began to weaken in 1712, when Pembroke named itself after a Welsh, not an English, town. Two years later the town of Rutland named itself after a county. Finally, the naming system fell apart in 1715 when Edward Hopkins left a bequest to Harvard, which it used to buy land. The town was named Hopkinton.

Unimaginative Naming

Towns had a lot of land, and new settlements often sprang up next to them. Often the new names showed a lack of imagination. Northampton, for example, was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1656. Southampton, Easthampton and Westhampton followed. Some 25 towns in Massachusetts have such derivative names.

Connecticut settlers took the same approach. Woodstock, for example, has North, South, East and West Woodstock, along with Woodstock Valley and Woodstock Hill. Rhode Island, always the rebel, has an East and West Greenwich, but no Greenwich, and a North and South Kingstown, but no Kingstown. It does have an East and North Providence, though, to go with God’s mercy.

Wartime Naming

Then came the French and Indian wars, starting in 1688. New Englanders began naming towns after the heroes of those conflicts: Lord Jefferey Amherst inspired namings in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire. William Pepperrell got a town in Massachusetts named after him, and New Hampshire named Wolfeboro after Gen. Richard Wolfe’s victory in Quebec.

 

Rhode Island and New Hampshire each named a town after naval hero Peter Warren, who led the capture of the French fort at Louisbourg in 1745. The other four New England states also named towns for a different Warren — Joseph Warren, who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill. (The hill, by the way, was named after its owner, George Bunker.)

But what about those royal titles and symbols that show up in place names? Those, too, are a product of the French and Indian wars. Names like King, Queen, Prince, Princess, Hanover and Orange symbolized the nation—which was, by 1707, Great Britain.

Then came the Great Awakening in the 1730s, which gave Connecticut Goshen, Canaan, Bethlehem and Sharon.

How the English Named the Small Things

The early explorers named for large geographical features. They adapted the Native names for rivers and mountains, like Connecticut, Katahdin and Penobscot. Or they named things after themselves, as in the case of Samuel Champlain, who bestowed his name on a lake.

The English government set the tone for naming towns. But when it came to small things, like streams and streets, New Englanders invented some of their own terminology.

They preferred “pond” to “lake” and “brook” to “creek.” Mainers liked “stream” better than “brook,” and that usage spread across northern New England. New Englanders use “cape” instead of “peninsula,” “neck” in the case of a small peninsula or narrow strip of land surrounded by water.

Forget about “gap” – in New England the pass between mountains is a “notch.”

“Intervale: is also a New England word: it’s from alluvial flats lying along the margins of streams and it comes from inter (within) and vallis (vale or valley).

The English also named things after plants and animals. The region is full of Chestnut Hills and Beaver Brooks. The colonists named things after their shape; hence, Spectacle Island and Spectacle Pond. Sugar then came in a loaf with a point at one end, so “Sugarloaf” not only named hills, it became the name of the kind of hill it resembled.

After the Revolution

The American Revolution changed everything. After the war, towns, streets, schools, bridges, mountains and all manner of things were named Washington, Adams, Revere and Franklin, as well as Freedom and Independence. A Cape Cod town even gave itself a French name after that country’s help in the war.

The Second Great Awakening and foreign wars further expanded the range of names a town could take. Much of the interior of Maine was settled after the Revolution, and so Maine towns sound a bit different than the rest of New England. For various reasons, Mainers liked to name their towns after cities and countries. Hence, Maine has a Peru, a Mexico, a Denmark and a Moscow.

Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont all have a Berlin. One would think that would have to do with admiration for the German city. But the New England towns incorporated well before Berlin hadn’t grown enough to be known in the colonies. They’re actually closer to Burlington than Berlin.

George Stewart, whose book, Names on the Land, informs much of this story, explains. Berlin, he wrote, probably comes from Burland or Birling, an English name, and the English inability to spell consistently.

With thanks to Names on the Land: a historical account of place-naming in the United States by George Stewart.

Images: Highway overpass: By Sensboston – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71387878.