Concord River

The Concord River is the larger of Billerica's two rivers and runs north through the western half of the town. It is formed at Egg Rock in Concord, where the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers meet, and flows about sixteen miles to the Merrimack River at Lowell, draining some 377 square miles. The river comes into Billerica in the south, where its west bank was cut off to Carlisle in 1780, passes South Billerica and Rio Vista, River Pines, Riverhurst and the meadows west of the Center, and reaches North Billerica, where it leaves the town for Lowell below the old Town Farm. Henry A. Hazen wrote that the Shawshin "winds dreamily through its meadows on the east, and on the west is the Concord, much larger, but almost as sluggish, until it reaches the fordway and falls at North Billerica." Through most of the town it is a slow, weedy stream with broad meadows on both sides; the only fall is at North Billerica, where a mill dam has held a pond since about 1711. In Billerica it gathers Mill Brook from Nuttings Lake, Winning Brook from Winning Pond, Town Brook, Stearns Brook and several smaller brooks.

The native people called the river Musketaquid, usually translated "grass-ground" or "grass-grown" river, for its sluggish water and grassy banks; the English named it for Concord, the town upstream settled in 1635. In the early Billerica records it is as often simply "the great river." It is the setting of the earliest landmark in the town's history. In January 1637/8 Governor John Winthrop and Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley came down the river from Concord to choose their farms, and at "two great stones standing neare together, close by the ryver-side that comes fro Concord," they named the stones the Two Brothers, the line between the two farms. The stones still lie on the east bank a short distance south of the Billerica line, in Bedford. When Simon Willard and Edward Converse viewed Shawshin for the General Court in June 1642, they "came to Concord Ryver, a little belowe the falls," and went up it some five miles to "a place called the Two Brethren," and that month the Court granted Cambridge all the land "lying upon Shaweshin Ryver, & between that & Concord Ryver, & between that & Merrimack Ryver." The Concord was the western bound of Shawshin until 1655, when the land west of the river, from the Pawtucket stake near Chelmsford south to the Concord line, was added to the new town of Billerica. The settlers divided the river meadows among themselves from the first; the great common field of 1659 lay "on the East side of Concord river, below the great Bridge," beginning "at the little swamp next below the falls," and later divisions gave lots in Treble Cove meadow and "on the Concord River."

The river was the chief obstacle to travel in the town, and its crossings were among the town's first public works. The first bridge, at The Fordway above the falls, was standing by 1659 and was carried away by a flood about 1698; the towns then built the Corner Bridge at the Corner in 1699. The town built the Middle Bridge on River Street in 1737, and Hill's Bridge on the road to Westford was in use by 1736. The Middlesex Turnpike crossed on the Old Middlesex Turnpike Bridge from about 1810, the Faulkner Street bridge has crossed at the falls since the first mill dam (its history is told under Middlesex Canal Dam and Locks), the street railway brought a new bridge to the Fordway on Pollard Street in 1893, and the Route 3 Bridge over the Concord River opened in 1953. The town's water mains crossed on trestles of their own until the 1950s.

On October 4, 1708 the town granted Christopher Osgood Jr. of Andover the neck of land on the west side of the river "with the stream at the falls," on condition that he build and keep a grist mill there. His dam was finished by 1711, and its pond flowed the meadows above at once: in 1710 the town agreed to defend Osgood against the claim of Roger Toothaker for his flooded meadow and gave Toothaker other land in exchange. Osgood's mill privilege passed through Sprake, Kidder and Carleton to Thomas Richardson, who on March 25, 1794 sold "the Mills Mill priviledges ... together with the Mill Dam and Stream" to the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal for 1,350 pounds, subject to the conditions of the 1708 vote and to "a passage for fish." The canal raised and rebuilt the dam, which became the feeder of its summit level, and the masonry dam built in 1828 still stands. The water power below it ran a fulling mill from 1747, the woolen mill Francis Faulkner began in 1811 (see Faulkner Mills) and, after the canal company sold its mill rights to Charles P. Talbot and Thomas Talbot on September 22, 1851, the Talbot Mills on the west bank. The pond above the dam is known as the Billerica Mill Pond or the Concord River Mill Pond.

The dam was blamed for the wet meadows upstream from the beginning. In 1859 the towns of Wayland, Sudbury, Concord, Bedford and Carlisle and the meadow owners petitioned the Legislature, claiming that the dam had been raised and was kept at a height that ruined their hay. After hearings in 1860, commissioners appointed in 1861 set up thirty-four stations along the river and recorded the water for two months from July 27, 1861 while the dam was raised and lowered. They reported that "the dam at North Billerica is not the only nor the chief cause of the wet state of the meadows above," and that "the bars across the stream, especially the Fordway bar," the weeds in the channel and the summer release of water from mill ponds on the Sudbury and Assabet did far more damage; the effect of the dam disappeared at Robbins bar, and only cutting the dam thirty-three inches or more, removing the bars and straightening the channel would help. The Legislature did nothing, and in 1864 the town released the Talbots from Osgood's old obligation to keep a grist mill. The ledge of the Fordway bar was still a problem in 1913, when the town meeting was asked to pay for removing "rocks and weeds from the bed of the Concord river above Fordway Bridge," and in 1915 the State Harbor and Land Commission's contractor cleared boulders from the channel between the Fordway and Corner bridges, with the town's engineers and the members of the Billerica Boat Club helping.

By then the river was becoming a place for recreation. Summer colonies grew up on its banks in the early twentieth century, at Riverhurst, where the Riverhurst Boathouse rented canoes for trips to Jug Island, at Ranlett Grove with Ranlett's Grove Beach, at River Pines with River Pines Shores Beach, at Rio Vista and at Concord River Park. In 1925 Lucy B. Collier and Burton O. Sanford gave the town strips of the west shore near the Corner Bridge for its new town forest system, and the Town Forest Committee under Warren H. Manning hoped to build a "Riverside Reservation System" along "much of the Concord River shore." The state stocked the river with perch and bluegills in the 1930s. Floods came often. In March 1936 the river covered the highways and flooded the town pumping station to a depth of fifteen inches, "setting a new high water mark locally"; the August 1955 flood broke the town's force main at the Boston Road bridge; and in April 1968 ice floes threatened the Boston Road, Nashua Road and River Street bridges, families near the river were evacuated, and the River Street bridge was closed for three months. Later floods followed in the early 1980s, in 1986 and in March 2010, when the river overflowed in front of the public works yard on Boston Road. In dry summers the river fell to record lows, as in 1943, 1957 and 1985, and in the drought of 2016 and 2017, when the flow over the North Billerica dam all but stopped.

The river has been the town's water supply for seventy years. The first water works of 1898 drew on a field of driven wells "on west bank of Concord river" beside the Billerica Town Water Supply Pumping Station on Boston Road. When the wells could no longer keep up, the town meetings of 1950 and 1952 voted an intake on the river bank and a filtration plant, which went into operation in January 1956; "Our source of supply is the Concord River," the public works department reported the next year, in the driest year then on record. A 1964 town meeting article sought the right to take up to seven million gallons a day and to have water released from the Sudbury reservoirs at times of low flow, studied a storage reservoir on Dolly Brook in the 1970s, and watched closely when the Metropolitan District Commission proposed in the 1980s to reactivate the Sudbury system, the source "from which Billerica draws its sole supply of water." A new water treatment plant on River Street Extension replaced the Boston Road plant on May 18, 2006. Below the intake the river also takes the town's wastewater. The state assessed the town for "Investigating Concord River Sewage" in 1924; the wastewater treatment plant on Letchworth Avenue, expanded in the early 1990s, discharges to the river below the water plant; the public works salt pile on the shore was enclosed in 1983 so that "no longer will salt leach into the Concord River"; and after the state found that phosphorus had degraded the river, causing algae blooms and low oxygen, the plant added phosphorus removal about 2010.

In 1989 the town meeting asked Congress to include the Billerica stretch in a study of the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers for the national wild and scenic rivers system, and in 1995 it took up an article asking Congress to designate the rivers. Public Law 106-20, signed April 9, 1999, designated twenty-nine miles of the three rivers, among them the eight miles of the Concord from Egg Rock to the Route 3 bridge in Billerica, and the town has since sat on the River Stewardship Council. Much of the land along the designated stretch is now protected: the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge holds land on the east bank at the Carlisle line, and the town has added the shore lands of Vietnam Veterans Park, Bartlett's Landing, Concord River Access and, in 2018 and 2019, the parcels on Carter Avenue that became the Katie Durand Memorial Park, with a canoe and kayak launch on the designated river. The Ranlett Grove Beach Association gave its riverfront to the town as conservation land in 2002.

The dam that has stood at North Billerica since 1711 still blocks the fish that once ran up the river from the Merrimack. Shad and alewives were gone from the river in the nineteenth century, and alewives were stocked again as part of a restoration program by 2001. In 2003 the United States Fish and Wildlife Service proposed breaching the dam so that fish could pass. The proposal returned by 2018 as the Talbot Mills Dam removal project, led by OARS with federal and state partners; the Fish and Wildlife Service describes it as the largest dam removal ever proposed in Massachusetts, reopening some 135 miles of stream for river herring, American shad, American eel and sea lamprey. The Billerica Historical Commission opposed removal of the dam in 2018 and again in 2025, the Billerica Historic District Commission denied the application on June 4, 2025, and an appeal of that denial was heard in December 2025.

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