Penacook: At the Bottom of the Hill

You're passing through Penacook, a village on the Contoocook River just before it meets the Merrimack. The name comes directly from the Abenaki word penakuk, meaning at the bottom of the hill. It was the Pennacook people, a branch of the Abenaki, who built villages here for generations before European contact. Disease brought by traders killed a large share of the Pennacook nation, by some accounts as many as nine in ten by the early sixteen hundreds.

European settlers arrived in the early seventeen hundreds, calling the area Rumford before the whole township was renamed Concord in seventeen sixty-five. Penacook remained its own village identity, defined by the river and the mills that followed. The falls of the Contoocook powered textile and paper mills into the twentieth century, and dams on both rivers still generate hydroelectric power today.