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is one of two villages in the town of Freetown, Massachusetts in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. An original part of the town, Assonet was settled in 1659 along with the city of Fall River, then a part of Freetown. It rests on the banks of the Assonet River. As of the 2000 census, the village had a total population of 4,084; up from 3,614 in 1990.
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 Nipmuc 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:
where hassun or assin, which is a word used by southern New England Algonquian, means "stone". The -et is a locative suffix: "at the place of the stone". As the region is mainly a tidal marsh, the stone referenced is most likely Dighton Rock in the Taunton River next to Assonet Neck. 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.