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In 1630, John Winthrop, together with other English
emigrants, sailed across the North Atlantic, royal charter in hand. The
document provided that the new Massachusetts Bay Company, of which Winthrop
was governor, would run its own affairs in a territory that stretched
between what we know today as the Merrimack and Charles rivers. Seventeen
ships brought over one thousand settlers that year - men and women seeking
to build a new Puritan spiritual community and drawn by land and the
opportunity it promised. Over the course of the next decade, twenty thousand
more would follow.
Simon Willard arrived in 1634. Like many in the
first migration, he was well-educated and of good social standing. Quickly
he became involved in the lucrative fur trade, which sent him into the
wilderness, away from the new villages sprinkled along the coast.
Twenty-nine-year-old Willard wanted to establish a settlement inland, closer
to the source of fur. At the Algonquian village of Musketaquid, with its few
survivors, streams large and small flowed into two rivers, which in turn
blended to form one. This offered abundant shad, salmon, and alewives, plus
six potential mill sites. For decades the Algonquian villagers had
cultivated the meadows and tracts of upland bordering the rivers, so the
English immigrants would be spared the toil of clearing land for farming.
Beyond stretched the forest, teeming with creatures whose fur Willard
sought.
Though the Massachusetts Bay Company's General
Court (the company's stockholders) likely found Willard's initiative
impressive, they were not ready to have someone so young be a town founder.
When the Reverend Peter Bulkeley arrived in Cambridge in 1635, Willard
quickly befriended him. At fifty-two, Bulkeley was learned, respected, and
quite wealthy; he brought with him £6,000. Willard, Bulkeley, and twelve
families petitioned the authorities, and on September 2, 1635, the General
Court issued the town grant:
"It is ordered that there shall be a plantation att Musketaquid, and
that there shall be 6 myles of land square to belonge to it . . . and the
name of the place is changed and here after to be called Concord."
The new town was the first in New England settled
above tide waters.
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