Why Dunstable Became Nashua, New Hampshire

Nashua, New Hampshire, was called Dunstable until 1837, when it took the name of its river to tell itself apart from its neighbor, “t’other Dunstable.” A few years later the town split in two, largely over where its town hall should go, and it took until 1853 to put it back together.

A hundred and sixty years as Dunstable

Charles J. Fox, who wrote the town’s history in 1846, gives the change a proper send-off. On January 1, 1837, he writes, “the township laid aside its ancient name of Dunstable, which it had worn from its infancy, through good and evil fortune a hundred and sixty years.” It had been a colony town, a province town and a state town under that name.

So why drop it? The new name was “adopted in order to distinguish it from its neighbor ‘t’other Dunstable,’” Fox says. That neighbor was Dunstable, Massachusetts, which Fox’s book counts as part of the same old township. And the name they picked was “that of the river from which its prosperity is chiefly derived.” Fox says the village’s growth from 1830 to 1837 “was rapid and constant,” and he counts 5,065 people in April 1836.

The river and its name

The Nashua River comes up from Massachusetts and meets the Merrimack in the city. The 1874 state gazetteer compiled by Alonzo Fogg says it “was named for a tribe of Indians called the ‘Nashaway,’” who had their headquarters on its banks, “in the present town of Lancaster, Massachusetts.” Fox also places the Nashaways at Lancaster. The old court records, Fox adds, called the river something else entirely: Watananock.

What the word Nashua means is less certain. The government’s place-name bulletin, written by Henry Gannett in 1905, says only this: “An Indian word meaning ‘land between.’” The federal place-name database repeats it. R. A. Douglas-Lithgow’s 1909 dictionary of New England’s Native place names gives “Between” and “Land between.” C. E. Potter’s 1856 History of Manchester had offered something else entirely: “Nashua means the river with a pebbly bottom.” None of these writers names a language expert or says how the translation was worked out, so you should treat both readings as old, unexplained translations, not a settled answer.

Nashua and Nashville

Then it got complicated. In 1842, Fox writes, “the town of Nashua was divided, and a part of the territory, chiefly lying north of the Nashua river, received the name of Nashville.” The legislature passed the act on June 23, 1842, and the new town organized that July.

Fogg says the split “was caused largely on the location of the Town Hall.” Nashville walked away with the depot, the Jackson Cotton Mills, three churches, two hotels and more than two thousand people. Then they patched it up. “In 1853, the two towns were consolidated and chartered as the city of Nashua,” Fogg writes, with Joseph Baldwin as its first mayor.

So Nashville, New Hampshire, came and went in about eleven years. If you look at the 1905 map above, you can see the line it followed: the Nashua River runs right through the city, with the bigger street grid on the south bank.

Sources & further reading

• Charles J. Fox, History of the Old Township of Dunstable (1846). The Nashaways at Lancaster (p. 19); Watananock as the river’s name in the court records (p. 21); the village’s growth from 1830 to 1837 (p. 208); the change from Dunstable to Nashua on January 1, 1837, and the population of 1836 (p. 209); the split of 1842 and the act creating Nashville (pp. 211–213).
• Alonzo J. Fogg, The Statistics and Gazetteer of New-Hampshire (1874), pp. 264, 270. The river “named for a tribe of Indians called the ‘Nashaway’” (p. 264); the split “dividing the village by the river,” the town hall quarrel, what Nashville got, and the city charter of 1853 (p. 270).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 220. Nashua: “An Indian word meaning ‘land between.’”
• R. A. Douglas-Lithgow, Dictionary of American-Indian Place and Proper Names in New England (1909), p. 75. Nashua River: “Between.” “Land between.”
• C. E. Potter, The History of Manchester, Formerly Derryfield, in New-Hampshire (1856), p. 26. A different reading of the word: “the river with a pebbly bottom.”
• GNIS feature 868677 (U.S. Geological Survey). Nashua’s entry in the national place-name database, with the same “land between” reading.