The Good Fishing Place: Amoskeag Falls and the Pennacook

Stand at the edge of the Merrimack and you are standing at a crossroads that has drawn people for thousands of years. The river drops fifty feet over the course of a quarter mile here, churning through a series of granite ledges in a rush of white water. The Pennacook people called it Namoskeag, which translates, roughly, as "the good fishing place."

They were not wrong. Every spring, Atlantic salmon, shad, alewife, and sturgeon crowded the pools below the falls, resting before attempting the ledges. Pennacook fishers worked the water with nets strung across the narrower channels and wove weirs from willow branches where the current slowed.

A European observer writing in sixteen thirty-four noted that a settlement called Amuskeage was already a noted habitation along the New England coast. The archaeological record suggests continuous use going back several thousand years. This was not a seasonal camp.

It was a hub, a place people returned to because the river was predictably generous. The Pennacook confederacy anchored its world along the upper Merrimack, with major communities at Amoskeag and at Pennacook, which is now Concord, farther upriver. The diplomat Passaconaway led the confederacy through the catastrophic years of English contact in the sixteen hundreds, absorbing epidemic disease and colonial encroachment with what history records as careful statecraft.

By the early seventeen hundreds, most Pennacook families had withdrawn northward toward what is now Canada. The falls are still here. Dams and canals have altered their profile considerably, but the granite ledges remain.