CONCORD, a town of Middlesex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 2om. N.W. of Boston, served by the Boston and Maine Railroad. It has an area of 25sq.m., and a population in 193o (Federal census) of 7,477. The State reformatory for men is situ ated here.
The village of Concord, where the confluence of the Sudbury and the Assabet forms the beautiful little Concord river celebrated by Thoreau, has a wealth of historic and literary associations. A county convention held here in Aug. 1774 recommended the call ing of the first provincial congress of Massachusetts, which met here on Oct. 1, 1774, and in March and April 1775. After that the colonists began storing military supplies in the village, and it became the objective of the British expedition which at Lexington on April 19, 1775, engaged in the first battle of the Revolution. In a brief engagement at Lexington early in the morning, blood was shed on both sides, but no British were killed. At Concord 50o minute-men confronted the British troops and drove them back on Lexington. A granite obelisk, erected in 1837, when Em erson wrote his ode on the battle, marks the spot where the first British soldiers fell. Across the stream, "where once the embat tled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world," is a fine bronze "minute-man" by D. C. French. Many notable ora tions have been delivered here on the anniversary of the battle, among them one by Edward Everett in 1825 and one by George William Curtis in The town was settled and incorporated in 1635. It was the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A. Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa, and other distinguished writers and philosophers. From the "Old Manse," built in 1765 for William Emerson, his grandson wrote Nature, and Hawthorne wrote his Mosses from an Old Manse. "Orchard house" still stands—the home of the Alcotts during the years when the "Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature" (1879-88) was held in a rude building adjoining. The "Concord" grape was first grown here by Ephraim Bull in 1853, marking the beginning of the cultivation of table grapes in America on a com mercial scale.