About Concord MA
Founded in 1635, only fifteen years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, Concord was the Massachusetts Bay Colony's first town beyond tidewater: there was no sea inlet or river on which to move inland from the coast. One had to travel by land on foot or horse via Indigenous paths from Cambridge, fifteen miles away.
Nashawtuck (Egg Rock), place of the original Pennacook village at the confluence of the Assabet & Sudbury rivers.
Concordians are justly proud of their long and eventful history, especially the first American victory in the Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775), and the mid-19th-century flowering of Concord's literary scene, with Emerson, Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott writing enduring works still read around the world.
Minutemen march across Old North Bridge on Patriots Day.
For many Concordians today, their town of about 18,000 inhabitants is an exurb, if not a suburb, of Boston, with convenient train service and highway routes to and from the big city, bringing its cultural, institutional and commercial wealth within easy reach.
Concord is still among the New England towns that governs itself by Town Meeting, an annual event at which Concordians crowd into the high school and constitute themselves as a legislative body to make decisions on town ordinances, finances, schools, land use, and any other matter that concerns town government. Town Meeting's rulings are then carried out by a Select Board, Finance Committee, other committees and boards, and a salaried professional staff headed by a Town Manager.
Inscription at Nashawtuck ("Egg Rock"), site of the Pennacook settlement present when the English colonists arrived: "On the hill Nashawtuck at the meeting of the rivers and along the banks lived the Indian owners of Musketaquid before the white men came."
