The Minutemen and Their World

The final chapter surveys the three decades after the Revolution, as Concord entered the 19th century with the rest of the world. In the 1790s, the economy recovered as the outbreak of war in Europe made America a trading hub for goods from the Caribbean. With the windfalls from this new era of prosperity, the town undertook significant (and long overdue) infrastructure improvements. Roads were straightened and relaid, farmers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the exhausted land, and new social organizations sprang up to supplement the town’s long-term religious and governmental institutions.

The most important of these was the Social Circle, a group of the town’s political and social leaders. While the existence of this and other social organizations in theory benefited the whole town, in practice they strengthened the divide between the elite and the rest of the town, in the process “weakening the old colonial community” (174). As this group led the community in imagining their town as a potential urban center of the region, Concord strengthened its ties with Boston. Concord was attracting the attention of tourists as the birthplace of the Revolution, and it tried, without success, to parlay this higher-profile status into a position as the governmental center of Middlesex County.