A 1670 description of Long Island said, "The Fruits natural to the Island, are Mulberries, Posimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries." The huckleberry, named after the similar English hurtleberry, is small and dark, something like a blueberry. The resemblance is such that in some places huckleberry is used as the name for the blueberry.

Both in agriculture and in the American vocabulary, the huckleberry has been humble. In the 1800s, huckleberry meant "a small thing," as in an 1844 account from West Virginia: "Why, this thing laying here ain't a circumstance--hardly a huckleberry to him." A small bet was "a huckleberry to a persimmon." By virtue of its lowly status, however, huckleberry was chosen for the title role in one of the most renowned of American novels, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), starring a character introduced in a supporting role in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). "No, one doesn't name his characters haphazard," Twain told an interviewer in 1895. "Finn was the real name of the other boy, but I tacked on the 'Huckleberry.' You see, there was something about the name 'Finn' that suited, and 'Huck Finn' was all that was needed to somehow describe another kind of a boy than 'Tom Sawyer,' a boy of lower extraction or degree."