13. All Manner of Business: The Anderson Market Building During the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The varied uses of the Anderson Market building at mid-century provide a good representation of the business activities taking place on the Mill Dam during that period. Recalling the various tenants in the Anderson Market building in Houses in Concord in 1885, John Shepard Keyes (1821-1910) remembered the building as “the brick hatters [sic] shop of my earliest memory,” and the later occupancy of A.C. Collier on the west side of the building while the east side was used by a milliner. Keyes himself had an office there in 1860, and when he left, a milliner and dressmaker used it as a shop and a tenement (living quarters). Still later, when Lewis Flint had his grocery business on the first floor, Keyes recalled the upstairs being used by “Gunnison, a barber and wig maker.” Other businesses in the vicinity of the building included an apothecary, a book bindery, a cabinet shop, a tailor, a meat market, a fish market, a shoe store, a harness shop, a carriage painter, and a furniture store.

Adams Tolman, adding his annotations in 1915 to Keyes’s earlier observations, remembered the second floor of the building being used as a photographer’s studio and the headquarters of the Concord Equal Suffrage League.