Quinsigamond: Before Worcester Was Worcester

The lake at the heart of this city has a name that stretches back centuries. Quinsigamond. It is a Nipmuc word, and it belonged to this place long before any English settler put pen to a deed.

The Nipmuc people had lived in what is now Worcester County for thousands of years. At the time of contact, they were a fairly large grouping across the region. They farmed, fished these waters, and maintained villages at sites around the area, among them Pakachoag Hill in what is now Auburn.

English colonists established what they called Quinsigamond Plantation by sixteen seventy-three. English settlers began building on the site, and in sixteen seventy-four, colonial official Daniel Gookin obtained a deed to eight square miles of this land from the Nipmuc. Deals like that tell you something about the power imbalance baked into every transaction of that era.

The peace did not hold. In sixteen seventy-five, King Philip's War shattered the region. Many Nipmuc joined the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, in a war against colonial expansion. Worcester's infant settlement was abandoned and then burned. Colonists left a second time during Queen Anne's War in seventeen oh two. Only in seventeen thirteen did permanent English settlement finally take hold, and the town of Worcester was formally incorporated nine years later, in seventeen twenty-two.

Those deep Nipmuc roots shaped the geography of this city, its water routes, its hilltop ridgelines, the very names still in use today. Every time someone says "Quinsigamond," they are, perhaps without knowing it, speaking the language of the people who were here first.