Big Blue is Our Logo
It is arguably the most historic site in the Commonwealth. Its original name was Massachuset. Yet its historical significance is commemorated in a wink and a nod. The last time Great Blue Hill got respect befitting its historical significance was on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826, when a local parade marched to the summit and its spokesperson declared, “This mountain is consecrated and hallowed ground, dedicated to Liberty and Independence.” But even that grand gesture overlooked the historical significance of this landform to this commonwealth. I’d like to set the record straight once and for all for some high ground that deserves a whole lot higher regard than we accord it: Great Blue Hill.
The Friends of the Blue Hills say it best: “Massachusetts, an Algonquin name, translates as ‘At the Great Hill.’ Four hundred years ago the local Native Americans used the term to refer to themselves. In adopting the name for their settlement, the Bay colonists ensured that the entire state would be named after Blue Hill.” The fact survives in web sites and history books (1), even the official state poem, but nowhere on the hill itself is there a sense of shrine or even a plaque bearing the message connecting this place to its original name. The closest equivalent is a passing reference in an exhibit in the Trailside Museum at the hill’s base.
1. "This word was the name for an Indian tribe who lived around the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay. The word Massachusetts, according to Roger Williams, signifies, in the Indian language, Blue-Hills”, John Warner Barber, Historical Collections of Massachusetts (Worcester: Dorr Howland & Co., 1839), 10. “..there is general agreement about the translation of certain [Native American] names such as Massachusetts to ‘Great Blue Hill,’” concurs Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 70
If only it had been a whole lot higher, things might have been different. At an elevation of 635 feet, the glacially scoured, bald-pate granite rock may not look like Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro. It is only a hundred feet taller than the next tallest of its nineteen neighbors collectively known as the Blue Hills, so they steal some of its thunder. So what if Big Blue is the highest peak so near the coast from Maine to Mexico. So what if the nearest inland peak towering any higher over the land at its base is Wachusett, fifty miles away. This has just not been enough to put Big Blue over the top, respected at last in her own Valhalla. As we drive by Big Blue on Route 128 in Canton, or look down Blue Hill Avenue, we mostly damn her with faint praise. That Big Blue is ground zero for the native American place name of Massachuset is far from our thoughts.
Among the half of the states with native American names, Massachusetts came first. Yet no matter how often we utter the syllables, we have to remind ourselves that a name like Massachusetts is not some Angloname like Maryland or Virginia or New Hampshire. Most of the time, we mouth these four syllables without recognizing that they are Algonquin, let alone that this foursome and the hundreds of other place names all around us describe elemental landscapes. The fact that our fair state is named for something indigenous and not insignificant—a specific place—is mostly ignored, occasionally mentioned in passing, and rarely grasped in full, remaining vaguely known and vaguely shown.
Adding to the blue haze that veils the subject is that most sources say Massachusetts means “at the great (blue) hills” and leave it at that, as if pinpointing anything more precise would be overreaching. And yet just such precision seems not only possible, but compelling as well. In its first appearance in print, the word “Massachuset” was linked specifically to two things: an indigenous people and the hill currently known as Great Blue. The year is 1614, six years before the Pilgrims and fourteen years before the Puritans set foot here. In his Description of New England, Captain John Smith, self-styled Admiral of New England (the same bloke whose case Pochahantas took up), first described “the Countrie of the Massachusets, which is the Paradise of all these parts,” and “the high mountaine of Massachusit” or “Massachusets Mount.” While most subsequent interpretations seem to assume Smith must have meant the collective Blue Hills, Smith’s language, as well as his engraved map, points to a single peak, by which the highest summit in the group must be meant.
The name might have stuck to the hill, except Smith deferred to Prince Charles, an English royal with delusions of dominion, a fifteen-year-old who for less than clear reasons renamed Massachusetts Mount and its adjacent range as the Cheviot Hills, after the hills on the Scottish border that are three times taller and three times further inland from the coast than our Blue Hill Range. This high-handed first attempt at importing a place name from Old England to New here did not exactly take where it mattered, here on these shores, although when Amsterdam-based cartographer Nicholas Visscher compiled a map of these shores from the work of Smith, Champlain and others published in 1655, he clearly delineated the grouping of “Chevyot Hills”, the tallest of which is “Mons Massachuset”.
Thirty editions that are close copies of that map kept that name in print over the next fifty years, but not in use in these parts. Here, Charles’ meddling was royal mischief enough to deprive the tallest of the hills of its rightful name ever after. As king, Charles went on to lose his head in other ways, and the Puritans, who might have honored the indigenous name for the landmark, instead started calling the range the “Blew Hills” as found on a map from 1642. Circa 1665-84 a map of land in Dorchester showed “Top of Blue Hill”.(2) By 1778, the State of Massachusetts Bay Council could ratify the hill-versus-hills confusion by ordering a beacon placed “upon the highest or most proper place of the Hill known by the name of Blue Hills.”(3)
2. Arthur J. Krim, in “Acculturation of the New England Landscape: Native and English Toponymy of Eastern Massachusetts,” in New England Prospect: Maps, Place Names, and the Historical Landscape, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings (Boston: Boston University, 1980), 75-7
3. Harold G. Travis, The Beacon on Sanderson Hill, Weston Historical Society Bulletin, c 1974, 3
For Captain Smith, as for all who sailed in after him, the undulating pale blue profile of the cluster of hills crowned by Great Blue was the first landform sighted on approaching these low-studded shores. Echoing generations of earlier European boat people for whom this beacon beckoned, John Adams put it like this: “If there is a Bostonian who ever sailed from his own harbor for distant lands, or returned to it from them, without feelings at the sight of the Blue Hills, which he is unable to express, his heart is differently constituted from mine.”
In his pioneering description, as I say, Smith also recorded “the Massachusets” as the name of a now lost people. Too busy to study the language, Smith left for others the question of translating the term. Among the very few Anglos who took the trouble to learn Algonquin was Roger Williams, who worked tirelessly for the rights of the native peoples and settled among them in Rhode Island. Williams is barely remembered for compiling his Key into the Language of America, which he published in 1634, much less for writing in 1682, “I have learnt that the Massachusetts was called so from the Blew Hills.” As well it might, since evidence of Native American presence in the hills goes back at least eight thousand years.
In the fifty years after Smith offered his version of the tribal name, the name went through many iterations. The original autograph Royal charter of 1629 refers to “Massachusetts alias Mattachusets alias Massatusets. (Yes, Massatusetts: there you go, southern readers!) William Wood’s map of 1634 boasts the first instance of the now standard spelling in print, perhaps accidentally, since his spelling for another well-known harbor comes out as “Marvil Head”. However often the natives uttered their name to the Anglos, our dialect-bewildered scribes and their successors mostly ignored Smith’s precedent. Other trails through the linguistic wilderness include “Massachuseuck” (in Williams’ Key), “Masathulets”, “Massawateusek”, “Messachusiack”, “Massawachusett”, and “Massachisans”. Sometimes singular, sometimes plural or possessive. From the generation of Anglos that included Raleigh and Shakespeare, who are not exactly known to have been sticklers for spelling even their own names the same way twice, we would expect no less. Heck, even now we still can’t agree on Algonquin, Algonkian or Algonquian. In that wilderness, many voices were not heard as one overnight. Standardization of spelling, let alone meaning, took time.
So many sounds, so tempting to play with in the translation. We’ll get to the variant translation in a minute, but the translation that has enjoyed scholarly near-unanimity is the one I’ve mentioned, in which massa means “great”, wachu “hill”, and sett “at”, specifically referring to the Blue Hills, if we are to believe Williams, and most specifically, if we are to believe Smith, the mount formerly known as Massachuset.
The name is unique in the region for its thematic focus. Unlike any other southern New England people whose name has come down to us, the people who welcomed the first Anglos to these shores named themselves not for a lowly water feature but for the high ground of their world. You had to go inland as far as Wachusett to find another mountain-named people. (Incidentally, this name, too, incorporates “wachu” and “sett”.) In conflating their name and place name, the original Friends of the Blue Hills seem to have been honoring these hills with a respect that surpasses ours. That downhill slide began when Smith’s Mount Massachuset et al. became a.k.a. the Blew Hills.
Look again at Great Blue. Perhaps it lacks an obvious Old Man of the Mountain or Squaw Rock profile, but in its subtle curvature it is indeed a logo for our time. Long before art deco streamlining, the glaciers refined the rough edges of the region, unifying drumlins of extruded gravel and mountains of granite in a common undulation. Long before the British Invasion, we can only suppose that Algonquins considered the hills and above all Great Blue something more than a hunting ground. Perhaps they recognized in Great Blue’s radial simplicity of shape something more sacred than a mere landmark. The geometry of Big Blue is more perfect than any other solid rock landform in its compass that extended as far as Nantasket, Woonsocket, Wachusett, Monadnock. This bastion of rock that so humbly yet elegantly lords it over all the other Blue Hills, as they in turn lord it over all the other hills for miles around, suggests an understated brand of leadership, a loose confederation, perhaps the perfect logo for what we are now. I suspect that Algonquins would agree.
If the name Massachusetts in a sense slid off this smooth hill, it briefly lingered on two other landscape features, and finally came to rest in a third: fields, river, bay.
First, Massachusetts Fields. There was such a place, but it’s long gone. The first Puritans arrived to find hundreds if not thousands of acres of cleared cornfields along the shore, backed up with grove-like forests kept free of undergrowth by controlled burning. One cluster of these coastal clearings was known from the start as Massachusetts Fields, as they had been cleared at the behest of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachuset nation. The first Anglo settlers found their work not so much cut out for them as done for them, so conveniently had the planters of these fields recently been decimated by some virus that the English confused with the will of God. The Massachusets, who had once been able to field three thousand braves, were down to only a few hundred hardy but harmless souls, who got the boat people settled, without getting them too unsettled.
As New Englanders know perfectly well, fields, unlike rivers and hills, are perishable landscapes. This quintessential lost landscape, the Massachusetts Fields were eventually buried beneath the Wollaston section of Quincy, and emblazoned on the city seal. Fortunately, before the era of photography, Eliza Susan Quincy recorded the vestigial landscape in several watercolors now preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Besides patches of marsh and grass along Quincy Shore Drive and Blacks Creek, the closest surrogate landscape we have today is World’s End in Hingham.
Second, Massachusetts River: still with us after all these years. Smith’s name of choice for a certain well-known local waterway got nixed by His Highness Prince Charles, who much preferred the idea of naming the river after himself, and what fifteen year old would not? But for this mischief, the river would perhaps still be named for the people who were named for the hills.
Third, Massachusetts Bay. We’ll always have the bay named for the people named for the hills that crown the skyline of the broad-arc bay. How’s that for circular logic? The bay logically gave the coastal colony its name once the name came to encompass all the waters between Cape Anne and Cape Cod, although originally the term meant Boston Harbor proper, and before that, simply the waters off the Quincy shore that once lapped against the Massachusetts Fields.
And speaking of the Quincy shore, Moswetuset Hummock plays a supporting role in the saga. Though a hummock (“hammock” in the coastal south) is a coastal knoll, terra firma in a sea of salt marsh, this one looms larger. Here Chickatawbut, who spent the cooler season near the Neponset falls, spent the warm season. The fishing was easy, and the skyline above the Massachusetts Fields danced to the pale blue undulations of the Blue Hills. Moswetuset Hummock may be the oldest documented summer place on the east coast, a classic native American landscape. Chickatawbut was a mensch; did lots to help Anglos, and they loved his table manners. He and his people took nothing from the Anglos and left nothing but footprints. Still pristine and elemental, surrounded by acres of salt marsh, this acre-plus rocky mount, once covered with red cedar, now covered with red oaks as it probably was in Chicktawbut’s day, is unfortunately beleaguered on all sides by the heavy-handed ways of our world. The quaint moniker Sachem’s Knoll has fallen into disuse, and with it a little more of our collective imagination about the diminished Massachuset people.
When the Commonwealth rolled out its tercentennial historic markers in 1930, the hummock is where they chose to explain the state name. Some readers may have missed this, so let me quote it in full. “Moswetuset Hummock was the seat of Chickatawbut, sachem of the Massachusetts Indians; adjoining were their planting grounds. ‘Massachusetts’ means ‘at the great (blue) hills.’ With Chickatawbut Governor Winthrop made a treaty which was never broken.”
This mini-Blue Hill actually borrows its native name from Big Blue. I side with not only Roger Williams but also our early historian, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, whose landmark History of the Colony of Massachusets Bay came out in 1764. “At Massachusets, near the mouth of Charles river, there used to be a great rendezvous of Indians. That circle which now makes the harbours of Boston and Charlestown, round by Malden, Chelsea, Nantasket, Hingham, Weymouth, Braintree and Dorchester, was the capital of a great Sachem [Chickatawbut], much reverenced by all the plantations of Indians roundabout, and to him belonged Naponset (Dorchester Mills now Milton) Punkapog (Stoughton) Wessagusset (Weymouth) and several places upon Charles river, where the natives were seated.” So?
But then in a footnote Hutchinson makes a clear reference to the misnamed hummock: “The tradition is that this sachem had his principal seat upon a small hill or rising upland, in the midst of a body of saltmarsh in the township of Dorchester [now Quincy], near to a place called Squantum, and it is known by the name of Massachusets hill, or mount Massachusets to this day. The blue hills, so called, in the township of Milton, &c. are called in Capt. Smith’s map of 1614, Chevi hills, but they were called before Massachusets mount. Prince Charles changed the name, and also gave the name of Charles’s river to what had been before called Massachusets river.” Why is it the good stuff is often hidden in a footnote? To this fragile and underappreciated place labeled Moswetuset ought to be restored its rightful name: Massachusets Hummock, which was its name on a plan made as early as 1687.
In the view from the puddingstone peninsula of Squantum it all comes together: look shoreward, and the rounded profiles of hummock and hill that once shared a people and a name are in perfect alignment. A sachem in his own time, Governor Hutchinson summered on Milton Hill, halfway between the greater and lesser hills that he was so careful to name properly. Naturally, he gave his modest estate a Native place name: Unquity, and that, too, seems like a first. Like Chickatawbut’s, his place in the sun survives: Hutchinson Field, on the crest of Adams Street in Milton. (4)
4. Lost in the 1890s, both the one and a half story house with portico and gardens with a ha-ha wall were designed by Sir Francis Bernard (another Royal Governor in MA transferred from NJ), also architect of Harvard Hall. Hutchinson’s Field has been preserved by the Trustees of Reservations, the world’s first land trust, since 1898.
Effectively, if inadvertently, the Anglos dislodged the Algonquin place-name tribe-name from its rightful locations, appended the English place-word “bay” to it, and affixed it to a greater whole than even the Algonquins ever dreamed naming as one entity. For the next century, until 1780, Massachusetts Bay was the name the whole colony or province went by.
Meanwhile, the remnants of the Massachuset nation were resettled in villages of “Praying Indians”, among which Ponkapog’s perfect feng-shui just south of the Blue Hills, so fitting, just was not good enough. King Philip’s War in 1676 abruptly ended that utopian experiment, and all the others, and from then on the denizens didn’t have a prayer.
Whatever insensitivity affected their treatment of their hosts, whatever precluded the colonists’ command of the local language, to their credit the Anglos here at least honored their hosts with a proclivity to retain their hosts’ place names. But appropriation of the name Massachuset for statewide duty comes at a cost. Because the hill long known as Great Blue failed to keep its native American name, because the river failed to keep the name of the people who were named for the hill, because the primordial fields formerly known as Massachuset's were long ago built over, and because the hummock’s name has been quaintly retooled and redeployed, the ground zero for the name we all take for granted is obscured if not forgotten. Gradually, ever more oblivious to the historical significance of this stark landform that we call Great Blue Hill, we slowly belittle its stature and dilute its symbolic power.
Here are the ups and downs of the last century. In 1893 the Blue Hill Range fittingly became the largest urban wildland in the oldest Metropolitan Park system in the country (equally fortunately, four decades later tiny Moswetuset Hummock was added to the system), a magnificent recognition of its landscape importance marred only by the woeful silence on its historical importance that greeted Sylvester Baxter’s 1891 proposal that the Blue Hills be called Massachusetts Forest. True, in honor of Chickatawbut’s many kindnesses to his interlopers, their descendants named the second tallest of the hills after him, but this gesture makes only the most tenuous of connections between a hill and a hummock and a four-syllable place name. The best memorial we have come up with so far is the Blue Hills Trailside Museum, established in 1959 at the base of Big Blue, and now short of state funding commensurate with its significance. Yet even here, there is only the passing reference that the state got its name from the “Massadchuseuck” tribe, “people of the great hills”. The Department of Conservation and Recreation’s recreational mission here crowds out any focus on Blue Hill as an historic site of immense significance to the Commonwealth.
Superseding the observatory plunked down on the summit 150 years ago was a more permanent observatory and weather station privately built in 1885, joined by a very retro castellated tower in 1908, and operated by Harvard. In the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps subtracted a forest for a ski area on Big Blue’s northwest flank and added a handsome stone observation tower near the summit. In the early 1950s some other Anglo do-gooders led by Ralph Lowell crowned the observatory with a tower for an educational radio station. Its call letters WGBH paid inadvertent homage to Great Blue Hill as the primal beacon of local Algonquins, who long before radios and weather balloons knew all about using this high place for observing and broadcasting. In the mid fifties came the freestanding WGBH-TV tower and a state police radio tower.
At these infractions, Big Blue has been lucky, almost held in high regard; indeed, along the way, a third tower has apparently been removed. No water tower here either. Meanwhile, less protected hills, Bear Hill in Waltham for one, are becoming a hill matador’s dream of bristling airwave-barbs. In our own era it seems that, for a price, no wild hilltop can long continue to meet the broadband sky unskewered. The hills are alive with the sound of static. Wireless wins, the hillsides wither. The message dims that at least one summit hereabouts, Great Blue, Ground Zero for Massachusetts, ought to be sacred to all of us. Or at least to those who smoke the pipe of peace on Beacon Hill.
What to do? Long before there was a Beacon Hill, there was Mount Massachusetts. Too much time is spent bickering on one, and too little communing with the other. While it is way too much to suggest so bold a rectification of names as resurrecting the original name for Big Blue, if any state deserves to have and really ought to have an Official State Hill, this is it. Anything else? A modest degree of sacred memorialization designed by a Massachuset, at last setting the record straight, would hardly be amiss up there; I for one would love to trade one of the two transmission towers for a simply inscribed granite boulder. Perhaps here lies an opportunity for the denizens of Beacon Hill to come together and show how far removed their hill is from Mount Gridlock.
© 2023 Thomas M. Paine
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