If you have not already done so, follow this link for instructions to prepare your browser for viewing the newspaper pages.
Follow the links below to see an index of the available issues for each newspaper. Then you can view the pages of specific issues.
| Middlesex Gazette | May 4, 1816 - Sep. 1, 1821 |
| Middlesex Observer | June 22, 1822 - June 14, 1823 |
| Concord Gazette & Middlesex Yeoman | Nov. 29, 1823 - Feb. 25, 1826 |
| Yeoman’s Gazette | Mar. 4, 1826 - Jul. 18, 1840 |
| The Republican | July 24, 1840 - Aug. 6, 1841 |
| Concord Freeman | Dec. 11, 1834 - Mar. 19, 1847 |
| The Sunbeam | Sept. 27, 1839 - Nov. 15, 1839 |
| Middlesex Freeman | Feb. 2, 1851 - Jul. 2, 1852 |
| The Monitor | April 19, 1862 - June 21, 1862 |
For all practical purposes, printing was introduced in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1816, when Bettis and Peters set up shop on the Milldam, established the Middlesex Gazette as Concord’s first newspaper, and took up job printing as well. (Earlier, in 1776 and again in 1794, itinerant Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly had briefly issued books and broadsides in Concord).
Between 1816 and 1852, newspaper publishing in Concord was characterized by frequent changes of title and of management. The Middlesex Observer (1822-1823) followed the Middlesex Gazette and was succeeded by the Concord Gazette & Middlesex Yeoman (1823-1826), which was followed in turn by the Yeoman’s Gazette (1826-1840). The Yeoman’s Gazette, a newspaper with a distinctly Whig slant, became the Republican (1840-1841). The Concord Freeman (1834-1847), a Democratic paper, overlapped and competed with the Gazette. Between September and November of 1839, the Democratic Sunbeam overlapped with the Freeman. After a four-year hiatus in local newspaper publishing, the Middlesex Freeman (1851-1852) ran for a year and a half. Between its expiration in 1852 and 1875, when a second paper titled the Concord Freeman was established, no newspapers were published in the town.
Outside this sequence, the short-lived Monitor—a topical and literary rather than primarily news-oriented periodical—was published weekly in April, May, and June of 1862, during the Civil War.
In the significant gap between 1852 and 1875, Concord information appeared in the Lowell newspapers.
The Concord Free Public Library holds close-to-complete runs of all Concord newspapers from 1816 to the present time. The purpose of this Web offering is to make digital images of the library’s holdings of all Concord papers from 1816 to 1862—an important period in the town’s social, economic, political, and cultural history—readily available for research purposes.