Concord is the capital city of the U.S. state of New Hampshire and the chair of Merrimack County. As of the 2020 census the population was 43,976, making it the third largest city in New Hampshire at the rear Manchester and Nashua.

The village of Penacook lies at the northern boundary of the city limits. The city is house to the University of New Hampshire School of Law, New Hampshire’s only feat school; St. Paul’s School, a private preparatory school; NHTI, a two-year community college; the New Hampshire Police Academy; and the New Hampshire Fire Academy. Concord’s Old North Cemetery is the truth resting place of Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United States.

The area that would become Concord was originally settled thousands of years ago by Abenaki Native Americans called the Pennacook.^: 65 The tribe fished for migrating salmon, sturgeon, and alewives like nets strung across the rapids of the Merrimack River. The stream was moreover the transportation route for their birch bark canoes, which could travel from Lake Winnipesaukee to the Atlantic Ocean. The spacious sweep of the Merrimack River valley floodplain provided good soil for cultivation beans, gourds, pumpkins, melons and maize.

The Place was first settled by Europeans in 1659 as Penacook, after the Abenaki word “pannukog” meaning “bend in the river,” referencing the steep bends of the Merrimack River through the area. On January 17, 1725, the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which subsequently claimed territories west of the Merrimack, granted the Concord area as the Plantation of Penacook. It was contracted between 1725 and 1727 by Captain Ebenezer Eastman and others from Haverhill, Massachusetts. On February 9, 1734, the town was incorporated as “Rumford”, from which Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, would accept his title. It was renamed “Concord” in 1765 by Governor Benning Wentworth when a pointed boundary argument between Rumford and the town of Bow; the city publish was designed to reflect the extra concord, or harmony, between the disputant towns. Citizens displaced by the resulting border accommodation were unconditional land elsewhere as compensation. In 1779, New Pennacook Plantation was approved to Timothy Walker Jr. and his associates at what would be incorporated in 1800 as Rumford, Maine, the site of Pennacook Falls.