Victor Curran

Like Ruth Robinson Wheeler, I moved to Concord from Watertown, Massachusetts, and became devoted to learning and sharing the history of my adopted town. Unlike Ruth Wheeler, I’ve never been attacked by a bull.

The bull attack occurred on her farm on Virginia Road in 1940, when she was fifty years old. Fortunately, she recovered from her injuries. Wrangling cattle was not an ordinary occupation for a Vassar graduate with a colonial Massachusetts pedigree, but Ruth was not an ordinary woman.

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

Two white horses pulled the hearse into Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a top-hatted driver at the reins. A band of mourners followed on foot as they made their way toward Authors’ Ridge.

Except for the bright sunshine, this scene wouldn’t seem out of place in a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it happened a mere twenty years ago, on June 26, 2006. That was the day Hawthorne and his wife and daughter were reunited after his death separated them 142 years earlier. 

Concord Center takes justifiable pride in its history, but today great things are happening in West Concord. Innovation and self-reliance are nothing new on the west side of Route 2; they’ve defined the community for centuries. 

In a world where men claimed to have all the answers, Margaret Fuller made it her mission to ask all the right questions. “How came I here?” she wrote as a young adult. “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” She was only a visitor in Concord, but this town was electrified by her presence.

As hostilities grew between Massachusetts and the English government in the 1770s, popular opinion was divided. Concord’s “Patriot preacher,” Rev. William Emerson, spoke out for liberty and served as chaplain for Concord’s minutemen. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, lawyer Daniel Bliss, remained loyal to the King, and would be forced to flee for his life to Canada when war erupted in 1775.

At the end of the Seven Years’ War (called the French and Indian War in America), England emerged as the big winner. It had gained control of eastern North America, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and from Labrador to Louisiana. 

This victory, sealed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, came at a steep price. England’s national debt had swelled by an additional £59 million, equivalent to nearly £15 billion today. And the drain on the Treasury didn’t stop there. England had to deploy thousands of soldiers to keep the French and Spanish out and to keep the Indigenous population under control. 

Isabel Bliss hurried her three children, aged four through seven, off to bed on the night of March 20, 1775. The two men who had come to her door looked like local farmers seeking counsel from her husband, lawyer Daniel Bliss. They wore the homespun coats of plain country folk, but the muskets they carried told a different story. 

As the men huddled with Daniel in the parlor, talking in whispers, Isabel was startled by another knock at the door. She opened it cautiously and was relieved to see the familiar face of a neighbor. The woman was out of breath, and tears stained her cheeks. She begged Isabel to forgive her, because she had given the two strangers directions to the Bliss home without knowing who they were. 

As hostilities grew between Massachusetts and the English government in the 1770s, popular opinion was divided. Concord’s “patriot preacher,” Rev. William Emerson, spoke out for liberty and served as chaplain for Concord’s Minutemen. Meanwhile, his brother-in-law, lawyer Daniel Bliss, remained loyal to the King, and would be forced to flee for his life to Canada when war erupted in 1775.

One May morning in 1775, two men set out from Cambridge, bound for Lexington and Concord. The older one, Ralph Earl, was just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, but was already an artist of some note. He lived in New Haven, Connecticut, but he had come to Boston to paint portraits.