Plumber in Assonet, MA

Assonet was first settled in 1659, shortly after the completion of Ye Freemen’s Purchase. It was part of the Plymouth Colony until the 1691 merger with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The word comes from the local Wampanoag Indians, who had a settlement in the area, and has two meanings: “place of rocks” and “song of praise”. Those meanings are traditional, but the former can be segmented as (h)assun-et where hassun or assin is a word used by southern New England Algonquian to mean stone. The -et is a locative suffix, to give the meaning “at the place of the stone”. The entire region was sold to the English in 1659 by the Wampanoags, but, due to the Algonquian mobile way of life and the splitting and recombining of social units, the Nipmucs may have been subject to or at the time part of the Wampanoags.

The English settlement remained for many years a small fishing and farming village, growing to be Freetown’s more industrious side by the end of the 18th century. By the end of the 19th century, Assonet had begun to slowly return to its origins, having less and less industry in town. At the beginning of the 21st century, the village has once again begun to expand rapidly.