Boston, Massachusetts Was Trimountain First

Before it was Boston, the colonists’ town on the Shawmut peninsula was Trimountain. In 1630 it took the name of Boston, a town in Lincolnshire, England, and the old histories still don’t agree on why the settlers picked it.

Shawmut and the three hills

John Warner Barber’s Historical Collections of 1839 has an entry for every town in Massachusetts. In it, he wrote that “the Indian name of Boston was Shawmut, which is supposed to have signified a spring of water.” Notice the “supposed.” R. A. Douglas-Lithgow’s 1909 dictionary of New England’s Native place names gives Shawmut a different meaning: “At the Neck.” Neither book shows its work, so you can take both as old guesses.

The first English name is easier to explain. Barber says it was Trimountain, “the literal signification of which is ‘three mountains;’ for Boston was originally composed of three hills.” Elias Nason’s 1874 state gazetteer allows a second reading: the name came “from its three hills, or from the three sharp points of Beacon Hill.” If you’ve walked down Tremont Street, you’ve walked on what’s left of it. Barber says “the modern name Tremont alludes to the same circumstance.”

One sentence, three new towns

The switch happened at a single meeting. Barber quotes the colony’s court of assistants, sitting at Charlestown on September 7, 1630, which “ordered that Trimountain be called Boston, Mattapan, Dorchester, and the town on Charles river, Watertown.” He marks the date “O. S.,” for Old Style, the calendar England still used then. John Hayward’s 1849 gazetteer gives the same day, and the federal place-names record says simply, “Present name adopted in 1630.”

A minister, or the people on the ships?

Barber, Hayward, Nason and Gannett all trace the name to Boston in England, and Gannett and Barber both place it in Lincolnshire. What they don’t agree on is who the colonists had in mind.

Barber says the town “was named Boston in compliment to Rev. John Cotton, who was at that time a preacher in Boston, in Lincolnshire, England, who was expected over very soon to join the colony.” Hayward tells it the same way. Nason’s version leaves Cotton out. He says the town “was called Boston from Boston (St. Botolphstown), Eng., whence Mr. Isaac Johnson and others of the original emigrants had come.”

Henry Gannett, who compiled place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey, laid out both in 1905. “By some authorities,” he wrote, the name honored John Cotton, “vicar of St. Bodolph’s church in Boston.” Others, he added, “say it was named before the arrival of John Cotton, for three prominent colonists from Boston, England.”

Here’s the thing about the timing. Barber’s own book says Cotton “came over” in 1633 and “settled at Boston,” three years after the name was chosen. That doesn’t sink the Cotton story, since Barber says he was “expected” when the name was picked. But it does mean the man wasn’t there yet. The settlers who were there, by Nason’s account, had come from that same English town.

What none of these books quotes is a record from 1630 that gives the reason. The court’s order, as Barber prints it, just renames the town. So neither story clearly outweighs the other, and the part they all share is the safe one: the name came from Boston in England.

The name kept moving

Boston didn’t stop at Boston. In 1905, Gannett counted “sixteen places in the country” that “have taken their names from the Massachusetts city.” So a town in Lincolnshire lent its name to one colony town, and that town passed it along to sixteen more.

Sources & further reading

• John Warner Barber, Historical Collections … of Every Town in Massachusetts (Worcester, 1839). Shawmut “supposed to have signified a spring of water,” Trimountain and its three hills, Tremont, and the naming “in compliment to Rev. John Cotton” (pp. 532-533); the court’s order of September 7, 1630 (p. 435); Cotton’s arrival in 1633 (p. 19).
• Elias Nason, A Gazetteer of the State of Massachusetts (Boston, 1874), p. 111. Trimountaine “from its three hills, or from the three sharp points of Beacon Hill,” and the name from Boston, England, “whence Mr. Isaac Johnson and others of the original emigrants had come.”
• John Hayward, A Gazetteer of Massachusetts (Boston, 1849), p. 39. The name taken “on the 7th of September, 1630, in honor of the Rev. John Cotton.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 52-53. Both versions, Cotton and the “three prominent colonists,” and the sixteen other places named for Boston.
• R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England (Salem, 1909), p. 160. “Shawmut, Boston, Suffolk. ‘At the Neck.’”
• GNIS feature 617565 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Boston: “Present name adopted in 1630.”