A Short History of Concord

The Vote That Took Three Town Meetings

In 1891 the Legislature passed Chapter 370 of the Acts of that year, which let a town in Massachusetts go into the business of making and distributing gas and electricity. The law did not make it easy. A town had to vote yes twice, at two consecutive Town Meetings, by two thirds of the voters, using written or printed ballots.

Concord was unhappy with the cost and performance of its gas street lights and needed a new sewer pumping station anyway, so its committees on electric lighting and sewerage proposed combining the two. Town Meeting voted yes on March 30, 1896. Town Meeting voted yes again in 1897, which satisfied the law, and then declined to act, because a combined power station was estimated at more than $125,000.

On April 4, 1898, Town Meeting finally established the Light Plant, governed by a three member Light Board of local citizens: Richard S. Barrett as chair, with William Wheeler and Prescott Keyes. The chair was paid $75 a year and the other two $15. That summer the voters met twice more to argue about whether to bury the wires, and on July 23, 1898 they chose an overhead system because it cost less. A $35,000 bond built a combined power house and sewer station on Keyes Road, the building Concord still calls the Red Brick Building. In 1899 the town hired the Boston firm Stone and Webster to engineer and construct the plant, and Charles S. Davis, who had come from the Boston and Maine Railroad, became its first manager. Customers got electricity for lighting only, from dusk until dawn.

More than a century later the Concord Municipal Light Plant is still a town department, it still runs the town’s electricity, and it runs Concord Broadband too. Town Meeting still votes on its money: article 40 of the 2026 Annual Town Meeting warrant was Light Plant expenditures. Six votes across three years built something the town has now held for over a hundred, and every one of those votes happened in a room any registered voter could walk into.

A Library the Town Does Not Entirely Own

Concord had a town library before it had this one. What it did not have was a building, and that came from William Munroe, a Concord native who made money in dry goods and textiles and decided in retirement to spend it on the town he was born in. Munroe bought the land, worked with the town to widen Main Street, and paid to put up the building. Residents dedicated the Concord Free Public Library on Wednesday, October 1, 1873, at the corner of Main Street and Sudbury Road. The old town library moved in with nearly 7,000 items, and donations pushed the collection past 10,000 by opening day. Ellen Whitney, recommended unanimously on April 11, 1873, was the first librarian, and she ran the place largely by herself for more than twenty years.

Here is the part that is civics rather than nostalgia. Munroe’s gift also chartered the Concord Free Public Library Corporation, a charitable organisation funded entirely by private giving, to form and maintain the library alongside the town. That partnership still exists. Most public libraries in Massachusetts are simply town departments; Concord’s is a two party arrangement, so a resident who wants to know who decides something at the library has two doors rather than one. The town’s side of it runs through the library committee, which charter section 2 B gives the Select Board to appoint.

One more detail, because it shows that public access is something a town decides rather than something that arrives finished. When the library opened in 1873, a fence and a set of regulations kept readers away from the shelves, and only the librarian was allowed to take a book down. The fence came out when the stack addition was built in 1919, and readers reached the shelves themselves for the first time.

And Town Meeting is in this story too. At the 1985 Town Meeting, Concord voters appropriated $550,000 to build a climate controlled vault for the library’s Special Collections and the town’s own historic documents. The Library Corporation had already raised more than $830,000 privately. The vault and its reading room opened to the public in April 1991, and that is where Concord’s archives physically live.

1956: The Town Hired a Manager

Here is the piece of Concord history that most directly shapes who answers your phone call today. In 1952 the General Court passed a special act titled An Act Establishing a Selectmen-Manager Form of Government for the Town of Concord. Under the act’s own terms it had to go to the town’s voters, and Concord accepted it at the annual town election on March 7, 1955. It took effect at 11:58 in the evening on March 12, 1956.

What the act did was concentrate the hiring. Section 2 D gives the Town Manager the appointment of all officers, boards, committees and employees of the town, on merit and fitness alone, with four named exceptions that also need the Select Board’s approval: the Town Clerk, the Town Treasurer, the Town Collector and a board of five Assessors. Section 1 leaves only three offices to the voters, the Moderator, the Select Board and the School Committee, and section 2 C hands the Finance Committee to the Moderator to appoint.

The trade was deliberate: fewer offices on the ballot, and one professional administrator accountable to a board you do elect. Whether that was the right trade is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because the town holds its charter under the 1966 Home Rule Amendment and a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted. Concord has already done it once, by a further special act in 1973 that changed how a vacancy on the Select Board gets filled.

The History the Town Keeps Itself

A quarter mile from the North Bridge stands a house that carries a different part of Concord’s story. In 1823 a Monument Street landowner, Humphrey Barrett, sold thirteen acres and a newly built house to Peter Robbins, who was thirty and the son of Caesar Robbins. Caesar Robbins had been enslaved, and he served in the French and Indian War in 1760 and in the Revolution in 1776. Peter lived in the west side of the house with his wife Fatima, while the deed reserved the east side for his sister Susan and her husband Jack Garrison. African American families lived in that house continuously from 1823 to 1870. The building was moved to Bedford Street in the winter of 1871 and now stands at 320 Monument Street, so it is not on its original ground. It is open as The Robbins House, a Concord nonprofit that interprets the town’s African, African American and antislavery history.

Concord does not leave its past to chance. The town runs a Historical Commission and a Historic Districts Commission, it has a Community Preservation Committee that recommends spending on historic preservation, and Town Meeting votes those recommendations one project at a time. The Concord Free Public Library holds the William Munroe Special Collections and the town archives in the vault Town Meeting paid for. Which means the preservation of Concord’s history is itself decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up and be counted.