Salem, Massachusetts: How Naumkeag Became a Word for Peace

Salem, Massachusetts, began as Naumkeag. In 1629 newly arrived English settlers renamed it with a Hebrew word meaning “peace,” and you can watch the switch happen inside a single letter.

The letter that uses both names

The Rev. Francis Higginson reached Naumkeag on June 29, 1629, according to John Warner Barber’s 1839 history of the state’s towns. Barber reprints a letter Higginson wrote soon after he got there. It opens with the old name: “When we came first to Nehumkek, we found about half a score of houses.” A few lines later, he’s counting heads, and the new name slips in: “whereof 200 of them are settled at Nehumkek, now Salem.”

So by the time Higginson finished writing, the place already had two names, and he used both.

Why “peace”

Barber explains the choice. Higginson and the others “deemed it expedient to alter the name of the town, and wished to designate it by a term significant of their freedom from civil and religious oppression. It therefore received the name Salem, a Hebrew word, meaning peace.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey says much the same in fewer words: “so named by early settlers in the hope of peaceful security. A Hebrew word meaning ‘peace.’” Elias Nason, in his 1874 gazetteer, calls it “the beautiful scriptural name of ‘Salem.’”

Conant got there first

The town didn’t start with Higginson. Nason says Roger Conant broke up his “fishing plantation” at Cape Ann and came to Naumkeag with his companions in the autumn of 1626, and John Endecott arrived with his company in September 1628. Barber has Conant at Cape Ann in the autumn of 1625, before he found “a better place for a plantation a little to the westward, called Naumkeag.” Either way, the English had been at Naumkeag for a few years before anyone thought to rename it.

What Naumkeag means

The old name turns up in a lot of spellings: Naumkeag, Naumkeak, Nehumkek. As for what it meant, the source here is R. A. Douglas-Lithgow’s 1909 dictionary of New England’s Native place names. He lists Naumkeag, Naumkeek and Naumkuk at Salem, all as “Eel-land,” and credits the reading to “J. H. T.,” his shorthand for Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull. In his New Hampshire section, he ties the same word to Amoskeag, on the Merrimack. There he gives “eel-land” again for Naumkeag, but “at the fish-place” for a related spelling, Namaske.

That’s one dictionary leaning on one scholar, so you should take “eel-land” as the best old guess, not the final word. The meaning of Salem stands on firmer ground: Barber, Nason and Gannett all give it as “peace.”

Sources & further reading

• John Warner Barber, Historical Collections … of Every Town in Massachusetts (Worcester, 1839), pp. 218-219. Conant and Naumkeag, Higginson’s arrival on June 29, 1629, his letter (“Nehumkek, now Salem”), and the reason for the new name, “a Hebrew word, meaning peace.”
• Elias Nason, A Gazetteer of the State of Massachusetts (Boston, 1874), pp. 440, 443-444. “Originally called Naumkeag,” incorporated “by the beautiful scriptural name of ‘Salem’ (‘peace’)”; Conant in 1626 and Endecott in 1628.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 272. “So named by early settlers in the hope of peaceful security. A Hebrew word meaning ‘peace.’”
• R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England (Salem, 1909), pp. 74, 128, 132. Naumkeag, Naumkeek and Naumkuk at Salem, “Eel-land” (credited to J. H. Trumbull); the link to Amoskeag in New Hampshire.