Salisbury, and afterwards Amesbury, were named from the two towns so famous in England, the Salisbury Plain of Druidical memory, on which is the celebrated Stonehenge, and near by, the Amesbury where was one of the oldest monasteries in England. It is supposed that the towns were so named because many of the new settlers came from those old English towns. The latter name used to be spelled Ambresbury, and Tennyson in his "Idylls of the King" spells Almesbury. After the discovery by Modred of the guilt of King Arthur's fair and false wife, he says:--
"Queen Guinevere had fled the court and sat There in the holyhouse at Almesbury Weeping."
Describing her flight, he tells us that she sent Lancelot
"Back to his land, but she to Almesbury Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald."
There Arthur sees her for the last time and mourns over her before he goes forth to his last battle with Modred.
On the whole, it is not strange, considering its associations, and moreover the fact that this town in Massachusetts is the only Amesbury in America while so many other names are duplicated, that the people of Amesbury are not willing to merge the name of their town into that of the elder sister, even when those parts called in each "the Mills" are so closely united in interests and in appearance that no stranger could recognize them as two towns. It is only the Powow that makes the dividing line here. Blocks of offices and stores on both sides of the street, among them the post-office, common to both towns, hide the narrow stream at that point, and further up and down the towering walls of the factories make it unobserved. It is not here that one sees the Powow. But there is, or a little time ago there was, a place not far off from this main street where the river is still harassed, yet as it slips past in its silent toil with a few trees hanging low on the right, it has a fascination in spite of its prosaic surroundings; it takes naturally to picturesqueness and freedom.
One of Whittier's early poems speaks of an Indian re-visiting the stream that his forefathers loved, and standing on Powow Hill, where the chiefs of the Naumkeaks, and of the other tribes held their powows. Here for a moment, says the poem, a gleam of gladness came to him as he stooped to drink of the fountain and seated himself under an oak.