Claim · the grey record
Boston — formerly “Shawmut”, attested by Drake
An attested claim that Boston was formerly named “Shawmut”, drawn from Drake's 1884 collection and evidenced by the passage in the archive's own copy of that text. Filed beside the other attestations of the same assertion, unranked.
Boston was formerly named Shawmut
This is an attestation. The archive records who asserts it, since when, and on what evidence. It does not rule on whether it is true.
- Subject
- Boston
- Predicate
former_name- Attested by
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Attestor kind
- folklorist
- Attested since, as stated
- 1884
- Attestation strength
- single source — a count of independent attestations, never a truth value
- Variant note
- Attested by a folklorist writing in 1884, a century and a half nearer the usage than the modern reference works.
Evidence
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (Boston, 1884), on “Shawmut”
The Solitary of Shawmut.
Other attestations of the same assertion
These are variants, not corrections. They are listed unranked and unresolved; the archive does not choose between them.
Boston was formerly named Blackstone
Attested by Samuel Adams Drake (folklorist) since 1884 · single source
Boston was formerly named Shawmut
Attested by English Wikipedia (reference work) since as at the date of retrieval · attested
Related records
- about — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:claim:boston-former-name-shawmut-drake
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/claim/boston-former-name-shawmut-drake
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/claim/boston-former-name-shawmut-drake.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884) — source of record
- Licence
- Public domain — published before 1929 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- Shawmut
- Attribution
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Rights as stated
- Published 1884 and in the public domain in the United States.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | search | searched the archive's own accessioned copy of Drake for the name at a word boundary | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | quote | took the first sentence containing the name, unaltered, as the evidence | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |