6. Changing the Face of the Mill Dam: The Influence of the Concord Mill Dam Company, 1836

Charles H. Walcott’s transcription of an 1836 deed for the sale of land by Daniel Shattuck to the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company and the Concord Bank shows how much the appearance of the Mill Dam had changed from Edward Jarvis’s boyhood just two decades earlier. Though the streets remained nearly as dusty and muddy as they had been in Jarvis’s youth, by 1836 the Concord Mill Dam Company had been in business for ten years, and the construction of buildings, establishment of businesses, and restrictions on use (such as those stated in the deed) had transformed the downtown landscape. Moreover, the activities of the Mill Dam Company bolstered Concord’s larger importance in the life of Middlesex County. A seat of the county courts from the seventeenth century, Concord in the 1830s was a vital place, a beehive of commerce, trade, artisan activity, and politics.