The long-standing effort to create a permanent home for Concord’s famous horse-drawn coaches has taken another step forward, although it’s a funny-sounding one: Concord has transferred ownership of a potential museum to itself.

More specifically, the Concord School District recently sold the former Concord Stables building on the parking lot of the high school to the City of Concord. The price was $1, which includes space to park eight cars and an all-important “sanitary sewer easement.”

The eventual plan is for the city to take the 1905 building, which once housed the city’s horses used for work such as road building, snow removal and trash collection in the days before motor vehicles took over, and turn it into a museum for the Abbot-Downing Historical Society. The museum would display, among other things, the society’s collection of Concord Coaches.

“A lot of work needs to be done in the building before we can use it,” said Merwyn Bagan, president of the historical society. The ownership transfer makes it possible to start looking for funding from sources like the state Land and Community Heritage Investment Program.

Bagan said it’s too early to know how long upgrades will take. The Concord Stables have been empty and boarded up for decades.

“We think we would be able to put practically everything in there” once upgrades are completed, said Bagan. The building has two floors and a basement.

A 2019 tour for the ConcordMonitor showed that overall the building is in good shape, although people had occasionally broken in and done minor damage.

“There were four seats and a table set up in an unused room in the building. Someone had been rolling cigarettes there. Graffiti covered the walls,” noted the story.

The Abbot-Downing Company was the largest builder of stage coaches in the United States and employed hundreds of people in Concord. Its coaches were sold as far away as New Zealand, South America and Africa, and were highly sought after for trips to the American West before railroads came along.

Thousands of coaches were made, and fewer than 150 are still around. A major piece of the Abbott-Downing Historical Society’s mission has been acquiring and preserving coaches including No. 113, which for years was displayed in the front lobby of the Monitor building until the paper donated it to the society in 2019.

The coaches are kept in a barn on the Hopkinton Fair Grounds and even before the pandemic, they were rarely available for public view.

The Concord Stables building was designed by local architects James Randlett and George Griffin, also known for designing the Garrison School in Concord. That is part of its interest to historians, since few architect-designed urban stables for city-owned work horses are left in New England.

(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)]]>