Assabet River

The Assabet River is a small river about 20 miles west of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The river is 34.4 miles long. OARS: the Organization for the Assabet, Sudbury and Concord Rivers, headquartered in West Concord, Massachusetts, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation, protection, and enhancement of the natural and recreational features of these three rivers and their watershed. The Assabet and Sudbury Rivers merge in Concord to become the Concord River.
The river has had many variations of the same name over the centuries, without anyone knowing for sure what it means. Some traditional meanings are associated with the place. Assabet is said to come from the Algonquian word for "the place where materials for making fish nets comes from." Other traditional meanings are "at the miry place" or "it is miry." It is also possible to decode this name in the southern New England branch of Algonquian, spoken by the Nipmuc, Native Americans who once fished there. The name is segmented assa-pe-t from assa, "turn back", pe, a short form of nippe, "water", used in compounds, and a locative suffix, -t, a shorter form of -et after the vowel. The meaning would be "at the place where the river turns back." During floods the Assabet River reaches peak height sooner than the Sudbury River, so that at the junction of the two rivers the Sudbury's direction of flow can be temporarily reversed. A counter-argument is that the name was a corrupted spelling of Elizabeth. On various historic maps and documents the name has been spelled as Assabeth, Asabett, Assabet, Elizbeth, Elizabet and Elizabeth. The form of spelling was not uniform until at least 1850. Historic maps up to 1830 are mostly showing Elizabeth River, but by 1856, consistently Assabet River. In present-day Stow, the Elizabeth Brook flows into the Assabet River.

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