Assabet River by Other Names

1830 map shows Elizabeth River as the
border between Stow and Sudbury

River exploration tends to start at a river's mouth and work upstream, with naming following. At a major branching a decision is needed - is one the river and the other a tributary? Or better to think of the situation as two branches of the river? The Nashua River flows into the Merrimack River in Nashua, New Hampshire; upriver it splits into North Nashua and South Nashua. River naming was once as simple for the Assabet.

When Concord was established in 1635 the land - purchased from Native Americans - was originally referred to as Musketaquid for "grassy plain," and perhaps also meaning the river, as another history translates Musketaquid as Reedy River. This was descriptive. Both north and south of nascent Concord the river was slow-moving, with a very wide flood plain. The colonists coveted the reedy marshland as meadow, fodder for cattle and horses.  

Upstream the river forked at Egg Rock. Concord maps from 1753 to as late as 1835 refer to the north branch as North River, or on some maps Concord NR. An echo of this naming is the present-day North Branch Road, near the Concord/Acton border and parallel to the Assabet River. Settlement did not expand up both rivers at the same pace. Sudbury was named a town in 1639. Meanwhile, surveyors described the territory along the other river as "meane land," not settled until Stow was a named town in 1683.  

An early name for the Assabet River. Click on photos to enlarge

In Stow the river's name was in flux, with various maps and documents reading Asibeth, Assabath, Elsabath, Elsibeth, Elizabeth, Assabett, Assabet... One map even had it as Stow River. There was a consensus in 1830 that Elizabeth Brook flowed into Elizabeth River into Concord River, but by 1856, when Middlesex county was being remapped in great detail, it was Assabet Brook flowing into the Assabet River, with the pre-Maynard community identified as Assabet Village. (Nowadays it is Elizabeth Brook into Assabet River.)    

There is a well-known quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne (1846) which when cited now usually has the "Assabet" spelling, but what he actually wrote was: "Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth..."

Native American name? No one
knows for sure. Or what it meant.

As for how "Ass-a-bet" came to be the name of a river - a mystery. Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Our problem here is that various 19th century history attribute the origins to a Native American name, but if that is true, it would have been from the Nipmuc dialect of the Algonquian family of Indian languages. There is no resource to pursue this theory back to an original source. Supposed translations are to the reedy place, the miry place, or the backward flowing river place. A mire is more permanent - a marsh or bog - than a temporally fleeting muddy place. 'Backward flowing' is a reach. On infrequent occasions the Sudbury River, immediately upstream from the junction of the Sudbury and Assabet, flows backwards. This happens after heavy rain, and it happens because water from the steeper Assabet reaches the junction sooner than water from the flatter Sudbury. Place names are rarely for rare events, so this last theory feels unlikely.  

An alternative theory is that the various names of the river were corruptions of spelling of "Elizabeth." But it is more of a reach to go from this perfectly good person-name to Aisbeth or Assabath, both dating to late 1600s, than it is to consider all those Elizabeth-names as attempts to Anglicize the native name.

There are other examples of changeable naming. In southeast Stow, Bottomless Pond became Crystal Lake. In Harvard, Hell Pond became Hill Pond, became Mirror Lake. In early Sudbury documents the Sudbury River was referred to as the Great River, while at the same time the upper end from Framingham west was for decades called the Hopkinton River. And lest we forget, in 1902 the Town of Maynard almost changed its name to - Assabet.