First Nations People of Concord

Last fall, the Town of Concord and Concord250 were proud to be among the 37 selected recipients of a Massachusetts250 Grant provided by the Healey-Driscoll Administration and the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism. The grant funded the project “A Fight for Freedom: Honoring Patriots of Color.” 

For many months, scholars, interpreters, and artists collaborated to create this signature event. The program launched in March at The Umbrella Center for the Arts with a two-hour live event dedicated to uncovering and honoring the often-overlooked contributions of Black and Indigenous Patriots during the American Revolution and the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality over the past 250 years.

Native Americans have been planting The Three Sisters for thousands of years. Corn, pole beans, and squash have a symbiotic relationship when planted together. The tall corn stalks provide a structure for the pole beans to climb, while the beans provide nitrogen to the soil. The squash spreads its large leaves along the ground to soak up sunshine, conserve water, and reduce weeds. This tradition of interplanting goes beyond agriculture, though, and has important cultural and spiritual aspects to many Indigenous peoples. 

What was the Provincial Congress? In 1630, when colonists from England settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a charter allowed the settlers to run the colony as they saw fit. Therefore, there was a bottom-up government in addition to a top-down government. 

Thirteen-year-old Tasun quietly slipped away from her father Tahattawan’s clan counsel to sit on the rocky prominence called Egg Rock at the confluence of the rivers to consider how her world was changing. 

The Robbins House – Concord’s African American History started with a map. Local resident Maria Madison, PhD, who would go on to co-found the the nonprofit organization, The Robbins House Inc., noticed streets in Concord named after early Black residents such as Bristers Hill (33), Peter Spring (27), and Jennie Dugan (39) Roads. Who were these people? Dr. Madison and a few other Concord METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity) family friends created a map of Concord’s African American history so that students of color from Boston and Concord could see their own history reflected in this storied town. When the Robbins House, a residence which occupied two locations (23 & 24) from 1823-2007, was threatened with demolition, The Robbins House nonprofit was formed to save, move, and restore the building as a center for telling Concord’s lesser-known Black history.

You see the names all over town: Musketaquid, Nashawtuc, Nashoba, Squaw Sachem. These words invite us to learn the stories of the people who lived in this place for thousands of years before English settlers arrived.

The English named this place Concord in 1635, but it had long been known by the region’s first peoples as Musketaquid. In the Algonquian language, the name means “grassy river” or “grassy island,” and the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers have always been the lifeblood of the land. As Lemuel Shattuck recounts in his 1835 History of Concord, the local people lived “[by] planting, hunting, or fishing . . . and few places produced a supply more easily than Musketaquid.” ¹

The Concord Museum is unveiling a portion of its newly renovated and redesigned galleries on October 11, 2019. This is the first part of a multi-phased project that traces the lives of the people of Concord for over 10,000 years, beginning with the people of Musketaquid. The new galleries will also chronicle other key moments in Concord’s history –igniting the war for our nation’s independence, the blossoming in the American literary renaissance, and debates over slavery and women’s rights.