44. Ebenezer Hubbard, September 6, 1870. From a carte de visite (source unrecorded).

Born in Hancock, New Hampshire in 1782 to Concord-born David Hubbard and his wife Mary Barrett Hubbard, Ebenezer Hubbard came here at about the age of ten to live with his grandfather and namesake in the Hubbard homestead on Walden Street. (The house—now gone—stood where the post office is located today, at the corner of Walden and Hubbard.) A life-long bachelor, Hubbard lived alone and, like his ancestors, farmed.

In his will, Ebenezer Hubbard left the Town of Concord $1,000 to erect a monument on the bank of the Concord River where the Colonial forces had stood on April 19, 1775, opposite from where the Battle Monument had been dedicated in 1837. Stedman Buttrick (see #45) subsequently deeded a small piece of land on which the proposed monument might stand. At the 1873 town meeting, a committee—formed to consider Hubbard's bequest—recommended that it and Buttrick's gift be accepted, that a statue of a minute man be erected, that a bridge providing access to it be constructed (the old North Bridge had been dismantled in 1793 and never rebuilt on its original site), and that the dedication of the monument take place on the one hundredth anniversary of the Concord Fight.

Wizened in this 1870 photograph, the eighty-eight year old Hubbard seems the embodiment of the unsophisticated farmer. Nevertheless, he shrewdly understood that the wheels of government turn slowly. He specified in his will that if the town failed to comply with the terms of his bequest within five years of his death, his executor was to turn over the $1,000 intended for Concord to Hancock, New Hampshire.

Ebenezer Hubbard died on October 3, 1871. Three and a half years later, French's Minute Man was unveiled as part of Concord's 1875 celebration.