Lookout Rock on the Blackstone River, October 2014.

The Blackstone River was named after the Reverend William Blaxton ("Blackstone"). Blaxton was the first recorded English settler at Shawmut (Boston). Hounded out of Massachusetts Bay, he moved to the Lonsdale area of present day Rhode Island. The river was known to the English Colonials of the early 1630s as the Nipnet, Nipmug and/or Nipmuck (Nipmuc) River and variations thereof. This was likely a primary route for the Narragansett and Nipmuc people connecting the falls at Pawtucket with Lake Quinsigamond country and beyond.


“Rev. William Blaxton or Blackstone, B. A. in 1617 of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (and therefore presumably a Puritan), M. A. in 1621, had come out to Massachusetts Bay in 1623 with Robert Gorges, and settled about 1625 on the peninsula now occupied by Boston, its first, and for five years its sole, inhabitant. A bookish recluse, occupied with his garden and orchard, he yet welcomed and even invited Winthrop and his company to his peninsula. But he liked, he said, to be under the ‘lord-brethren’ as little as to be under the ‘lord-bishops,’ and in 1634 he retired to a place he called Study Hill, in what is now Rhode Island, where he lived quietly till 1675.” (Johnson, 46)



Johnson, Edward. Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England. A History of New-England, from the English planting in the Yeere 1628 untill the Yeere 1652. Ed. J. Franklin Jameson. New York, 1910. Web.