This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Concord did not begin the way most Massachusetts Bay towns did, built up along the coast where ships could reach them. In 1635 Peter Bulkeley, a minister recently silenced in England for refusing to conform to Archbishop Laud's ceremonial requirements, led a party of settlers inland to a spot the Musketaquid people knew as Musketaquid, on the river of the same name. English families had already begun living on the land before any agreement with its inhabitants was reached. That agreement, worked out with the sachems Squaw Sachem, Tahattawan and others, came later, in 1636 or 1637 depending on the account: the Musketaquid granted the planting ground they had long worked in exchange for tools, cloth and wampum, a transaction the English described afterward as securing six miles square of land, and one that later writers have read very differently than the English settlers who recorded it did, since the Musketaquid understanding of what the exchange meant for their own continued presence on the land was not the same as the English one. The settlers named their new town Concord, for the peaceable terms of the arrangement as they saw it. It became one of the first inland towns in the colony, and Bulkeley served as its first minister until his death in 1659. Two centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his own Historical Discourse at Concord, delivered on the town's bicentennial in 1835, by naming Bulkeley first among the settlers who made the town.