Concord, town, Middlesex County, eastern Massachusetts, on the Concord River, near Boston; incorporated 1635. It is a residential and industrial center; manufactures include electronic equipment and metal products. Among the points of interest are Minute Man National Historical Park, site of the first military encounter of the American Revolution; The Wayside, home of the writers Amos Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and The Old Manse, built in 1770, the boyhood home of the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Located nearby is Walden Pond, where essayist Henry David Thoreau lived in solitude from 1845 to 1847.
Settled in 1635, the community was named Concord because of the peaceable manner in which the site was acquired from the Native Americans. In 1774 aspects of British colonial rule were protested here at the first county convention of Massachusetts and at the first Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which was presided over by the American statesman John Hancock. On April 19, 1775, the Battle of Concord, a skirmish between British troops and minutemen, began the military phase of the revolutionary era. During the 19th century the town was a noted literary and cultural center; besides Emerson and Hawthorne, the writer Henry David Thoreau, the sculptor Daniel Chester French, and the novelist Louisa May Alcott (daughter of A. B. Alcott) lived and worked in Concord. In about 1850 Ephraim W. Bull developed here the Concord grape, which became a leading U.S. commercial table grape. Population 16,293 (1980); 17,076 (1990); 17,076 (1990).
