Founding of Concord, Massachusetts (1635)

In 1635, a party of English settlers led by Peter Bulkeley and Simon Willard began occupying land at Musketaquid, an inland site on the Musketaquid (Concord) River, and named their new plantation Concord. The English occupied the site before securing any formal agreement with its Musketaquid inhabitants; sources place the written land agreement itself in 1636 or 1637, when the sachems Squaw Sachem, Tahattawan and others consented to the sale, granting the settlers all the planting ground the Musketaquid people had worked in exchange for metal tools, cloth and a parcel of wampum, in a transaction later described as securing six miles square of land. Concord became one of the first English towns established inland from the Massachusetts Bay coast. The founding is commemorated in Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1835 Historical Discourse at Concord, delivered on the town's second centennial, which opens by naming Bulkeley among the original proprietors and describes the land agreement as a covenant made under a great oak.