Assonet

New Bedford stands on the Acushnet River beside Buzzards Bay, in a country long inhabited by the Wampanoag. Its harbour became a centre of the whaling trade, supplying ships for voyages far out into the Atlantic. Merchants refined whale oil and made candles, turning the products of the sea into goods for distant markets.

In 1652 English colonists purchased the wider Dartmouth tract from Wampanoag leaders, although the parties understood the transfer of land differently. Quaker settlers later established farming and fishing communities here. Merchant Joseph Rotch moved his whaling business from Nantucket to the mainland in the eighteenth century, and New Bedford became a separate town in 1787. Its growing fleet would make it one of the great whaling ports of the nineteenth century.