Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Named for the Falls (Big or Little?)

Every old source ties the name of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to a waterfall, but they split on whether the word means falls or little falls. The falls are where the river drops into the tide, and the name belonged to them long before there was a city.

A word for falls

Usher Parsons, who gathered Rhode Island’s Native place names for the state historical society in 1861, lists Pawtucket Falls, “four miles north of Providence.” He gives the meaning as “union of two rivers, and a fall into tide water, because there the fresh water falls into salt.” In his opening remarks he breaks it down another way: the first two syllables “mean water-fall at the head of tide water,” and the ending -et makes it “water-fall-place.” Parsons was honest about his limits, too. He said he wasn’t studying the names “as a philologist or grammarian.”

J. Hammond Trumbull, a Connecticut scholar of Native languages, went further in 1881. He defined the root pauntuk as “falls in a (tidal) river.” For this Pawtucket he quoted an old Native testimony from the colonial records: the river “is called in Indian Pautuck (which signifies, a fall) because there the fresh water falls into the salt-water.”

Big falls or little?

Now look at the U.S. government’s version. Henry Gannett’s 1905 bulletin says Pawtucket is “An Indian word meaning ‘at the little falls,’” and the federal place-name database repeats that line today.

Trumbull, though, gives “the little falls” to a different name. Pautuxet, he wrote, means “at the little falls,” because pautucks is the diminutive of pautuck. Pawtuxet is a separate village and river south of Providence, at the falls between Cranston and Warwick. Richard Bayles’s 1891 history of Providence County follows the same split: Pawtucket “signifies ‘falls of water,’” while Pawtuxet is “a place at a little waterfall.” So you’ll find “little falls” in Gannett, but not in the older Rhode Island sources. Since they all agree the name comes from the falls, the only open question is the size.

Two towns called Pawtucket

For a long time, there were two Pawtuckets, one on each bank. Bayles says the west side, in Rhode Island, was a village of North Providence, once known as the “Fields of Pawtucket.” The east side belonged to Massachusetts. It was carved out of Seekonk on February 29, 1828, and incorporated “into a town by the name of Pawtucket.”

Bayles writes that “the little local jealousies of the two Pawtuckets occasioned some friction” until the two states settled their long boundary dispute. The Massachusetts town became part of Rhode Island on March 1, 1862. In 1874 the North Providence village joined it, and Pawtucket became a city in 1885.

The name is a lot older than either town. Roger Williams’s 1661 deed for the Providence land describes its bounds as running “from the river and fields of Pawtuckqut.” If you want the rest of that deed’s story, it’s the one that explains the name of Providence.

Sources & further reading

• Usher Parsons, Indian Names of Places in Rhode-Island (1861). Preface: his collection is not a philologist’s study. Remarks: “water-fall at the head of tide water” and “water-fall-place.” P. 20: Pawtucket falls and “union of two rivers, and a fall into tide water.”
• J. Hammond Trumbull, Indian Names of Places, etc., in and on the Borders of Connecticut (1881), pp. ix, 49–50. Pauntuk, “falls in a (tidal) river”; the testimony “which signifies, a fall”; Pautuxet, “at the little falls.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 240. “An Indian word meaning ‘at the little falls.’”
• Richard M. Bayles, ed., History of Providence County, Rhode Island, vol. 2 (1891), pp. 1–3. “Falls of water,” the Fields of Pawtucket, the Massachusetts town of 1828, the “two Pawtuckets,” 1862, 1874 and the 1885 city charter.
• Roger Williams, deed of 1661, in William R. Staples, Annals of the Town of Providence (1843), p. 30. “The river and fields of Pawtuckqut.”
• GNIS feature 1218926 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Pawtucket, with Gannett’s “little falls.”