8. 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. 

By 1836, the downtown landscape was transformed, and the activities of the Mill Dam Company bolstered Concord's importance in Middlesex County. Concord had been a seat of the county courts since the seventeenth century, and with the help of the Mill Dam Company, it became a beehive of commerce, trade, artisan activity, and politics.