Scituate: an Irish mossing town in New England got its name by spell-changing the Native American word of a local brook

Satuit Brook widening along its flow into Scituate Harbor

The seacoast town of Scituate in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, is known for its once booming mossing industry [1]. Scituate started as a permanent settlement around 1628 when English emigrants arrived [2]—long before Irish immigrants launched the mossing business in the middle of the nineteenth century. The early settlers from Plymouth and the County of Kent in England named their new homesite after a local brook. On your Scituate Harborwalk you will find a historic marker (see picture) at the bridge over Satuit Brook summarizing the naming history. A nearby panel describes in more detail how Satuit became Scituate:

The name Scituate is derived from an Indian word which early settlers understood as Satuit, which means Cold Brook, and referred to the small stream flowing into the harbor: this they spelled in various ways as Sityate, Cituate, Seteat, etc. It was not until about 1640 that the name came to be universally spelled in its present form.

References and more to explore

[1] Emily Toomey: The Most Irish Town in America Was Built on Seaweed. Smithsonian Magazine, July 22, 2019. URL: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/most-irish-town-america-built-seaweed-180972701/.

[2] An Introduction to Scituate History, taken from text by Wilmot M Brown (1961). URL: https://www.scituatema.gov/about/pages/a-historical-overview.