Concord Village Historic District

About this property

The Concord Village Historic District in Concord, Michigan dates back to 1836, and consists of historic structures located along Hanover Street from Spring to Michigan Streets and North Main Street from Railroad to Monroe Streets. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. The village of Concord was first settled in the early 1830s by William Van Fossen and Thomas McGee. The village itself was platted in 1836 by Isaac Swain, a wealthy local farmer. A flour mill was built by Isaac and William Van Fossen on the north side of the river in 1837 and became the foundation of the local economy for the next few decades. Concord became a small village as more settlers arrived and built houses. A small business district, primarily in wooden buildings, grew along Main Street. In 1871, the Michigan Air Line Railroad between Jackson and Niles was built. The track was leased by the Michigan Central Railroad, and eventually became part of the New York Central Railroad. The availability of transportation spurred growth in Concord, and local agriculture boomed. In addition, small industries sprang up in the area around the mill. The railroad also heralded a residential building boom, with about fifty houses constructed in Concord in the early 1870s. At the same time, the wood-frame buildings in the villages' commercial district were slowly replaced with one and two-story brick commercial buildings. Toward the end of the 1800s, a series of fires destroyed most of the remaining wooden commercial buildings in the district. As the automobile rose in the 1900s, the railroad died out. Some auto-related businesses opened in the village, but the main highway (now M-60) was routed several blocks north of the downtown in the 1930s, and the district avoided the intrusion of auto-related businesses of the later twentieth century. The Concord Village Historic District contains the entire historic commercial district of Concord, Michigan, as well as the surrounding early residential development. The district encompasses a cross-shaped area extending along the two main intersecting roads of the village: Hanover and Main Streets. In 1996, the district included 120 structures, of which 106 were contributing buildings. It includes two separately-NRHP-listed properties: the Mann House and the Paddock-Hubbard House. The district is divided among commercial structures (primarily one- and two-story brick commercial Italianate buildings dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century) and residential structures. The residential structures are primarily wood-framed single-family homes, ranging from vernacular Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and Italianate, to Craftsmen designs. The district also contains three churches.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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