The Name Game

Greetings fellow humanoids. Welcome back to Adventures In Naugablogginland.  I decided that this installment would be about Naugatuck's name.

Have you ever given much thought to the borough's name?  It's obviously not one of the state of Connecticut's many names that have been transplanted from the mother country of England...think Cheshire, New London, Greenwich and Wallingford. And it's not one of the names for municipalities that are named after individuals, like Hamden.  Naugatuck sounds Native American and it is.

There are four Native American words or phrases it may have come from: Naukatungh or one tree; Nequetukh or place of one lone tree; Nawcatuck and a name that once had been applied to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  That name is Wnogque Tookoke or bend-in-the-river-place.  At various times, all or part of Naugatuck had the Native American name of  Matetacoke or Mattatuck when the area was part of what would eventually be called Waterbury in 1686.  Additionally it had been called: South Farms; Judd's Meadows; Deacon's Meadow and Salem Bridge.

I don't know if you, the reader, prefer to be called a Naugatuckian or a Naugatucker or a Naugatuckite and I don't know if there even is an official term for folks from the borough of Naugatuck. (By the way, if there isn't, there should be.  If someone out there knows, contact me.  Maybe we'll start a movement.)  However, just think, you could have been called a Bridger or a Meadowian.  Even more unlikely, the borough's official bakery product could have been Meadow's Muffins.  And with that profound thought, I'll end now with my standard closing for just about everything I write relating to history.

The past is our present to the future,

Ron Gagliardi