Massachusetts' Name and the "Great Hills" of Milton and Quincy

Massachusetts means a place “at, or near, the great hills,” and Roger Williams was told the hills were the Blue Hills, in what’s now Milton and Quincy. The name went from the hills to the people who lived near them, and from there it ended up on a bay, a company, a colony, and finally a state.

“At, or near, the great hills”

The best explanation of the word comes from J. Hammond Trumbull, a Connecticut scholar who spent years on Native place names. In his 1881 list, he calls Massachusetts “an anglicized plural of Massachuset,” meaning “at, or near, the great hills,” or “the great-hill country.”

He breaks it into three pieces. Massa means “great.” Wadchu means “hill” or “mountain,” and in a longer word it shrinks to -adchu. The ending -et means “on, at, or near.” Put them together and you get a place by the big hills. The final “s” is English: Trumbull calls the word “an anglicized plural.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey gives a shorter version of the same idea: “An Indian word meaning ‘near the great hills.’”

Which hills?

Trumbull says Roger Williams “learned that the name was taken ‘from the Blue Hills, a little island thereabout.’” The Blue Hills, Trumbull adds, “are in Milton and Quincy.” Henry Gannett’s list has its own entry for them, a “range of hills in Massachusetts, which are said to have given name to the State.” Captain John Smith called them the “high mountains of Massachusit.”

There’s a second, odder report. Trumbull says Josiah Cotton was told the name “specially belonged to ‘an hill in the form of an arrow’s head.’” R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, who put together a dictionary of New England’s Native place names in 1909, repeats the same two reports. He credits the arrowhead version to “the Rev. John Cotton, in 1708,” though, not Josiah. The two books don’t agree on which Cotton it was.

The people

The name belonged to people as well as to a place. Douglas-Lithgow writes that the Massachusetts, the tribes “bearing the name of this State,” held sway “for the most part, over the eastern territory adjacent to Massachusetts Bay,” though he admits there’s “little positive evidence” of how far their land or power reached. He says that around 1617 “the tribe was decimated by a pestilence and thoroughly disorganized by warfare,” and soon after, their land seems to have been split up among the Nipmucks, the Narragansetts, and other tribes.

Trumbull also notes that English speakers “easily corrupted” the name to “Mattachuset.” Elsewhere in the same book, he says the English often wrote it “Mattachusetts,” and once in a while “Massatusets” or “Mattathusetts.” You can see why the spelling took a while to settle down.

From a bay to a colony

By 1629, the name had landed on an English company. John Gorham Palfrey, in his History of New England (1858), says the company behind the colony had been “much enlarged” when, in March 1629, “a royal charter was solicited and obtained, creating a corporation under the name of the ‘Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.’”

So the company took its name from the bay. These books don’t say exactly how the bay got it, but the people who lived along its shores already carried the name. Massachusetts went on to become one of the thirteen original states, as Gannett notes. If you climb the Blue Hills today, you may be standing on the “great hills” behind the state’s name, at least if Roger Williams heard it right.

Sources & further reading

• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (Hartford, 1881), pp. 23, 26. “Massachusetts: an anglicized plural of Massachuset, meaning ‘at, or near, the great hills,’ ‘the great-hill country,’ from massa ‘great,’ wadchu (in composition, adchu) pl. wadchuash ‘mountains’ or ‘hills,’ and the locative suffix it, et, ‘on, at, or near’”; Roger Williams “learned that the name was taken ‘from the Blue Hills, a little island thereabout’”; Josiah Cotton, “an hill in the form of an arrow’s head”; “The Blue Hills are in Milton and Quincy, the ‘high mountains of Massachusit’” of Captain John Smith; “easily corrupted, by English speakers to Mattachuset” (p. 23); “often written, by the English, Mattachusetts, and occasionally, Massatusets and Mattathusetts” (p. 26).
• R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England (Salem, 1909), pp. xiii, 119. “Of the Massachusetts tribes that bearing the name of this State had dominion, for the most part, over the eastern territory adjacent to Massachusetts Bay”; “some time about 1617, the tribe was decimated by a pestilence and thoroughly disorganized by warfare”; their territory “seems to have been divided amongst the Nipmucks, Narragansets and other tribes” (p. xiii). “Massachusetts. ‘At or about the great hill.’ J. H. T.”; “The Rev. John Cotton, in 1708, defines Massachusetts as meaning ‘a hill in the form of an arrow-head,’ but Roger Williams says”; “The Massachusetts were so-called from the Blue Hills” (p. 119).
• John Gorham Palfrey, History of New England, vol. 1 (Boston, 1858), p. 290. The Company “much enlarged”; in March 1629 (margin date: March 4), “a royal charter was solicited and obtained, creating a corporation under the name of the ‘Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.’”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 50, 202. “Blue Hills; range of hills in Massachusetts, which are said to have given name to the State, the Indian name Massachusetts meaning ‘great hills’” (p. 50). “Massachusetts; one of the thirteen original States. An Indian word meaning ‘near the great hills’” (p. 202).
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Massachusetts’ permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 606926).