[2] Named by the area's original Abenaki inhabitants, the word Piscataqua is believed to be a combination of peske (branch) with tegwe (a river with a strong current, possibly tidal).

In the mid 1630s some of the region's earliest European settlers built a sawmill in what is today's Berwick, Maine, on a tributary above the head of tide of the Piscataqua.

It had left Germany with a cargo bound for Japan of a disassembled Messerschmitt Me 262 jet plane, the most sophisticated fighter of World War II; two top Japanese scientists; and two high-ranking Nazi officers.

While this was enough to create a media sensation, it was decades later before the U.S. government revealed that the sub also carried a top secret load of uranium oxide produced by the German atomic weapons program bound for a last-ditch Japanese effort.

Two rivers, the Salmon Falls and Cochecho, join to form the Piscataqua on the eastern edge of Dover, New Hampshire, at the northwest corner of Eliot, Maine.