Rumford Town Hall is located at 145 Congress Street, Rumford, Maine 04276; phone: 207-364-4576.
To understand the founding of Rumford, it is necessary to recognize that the present day Concord, New Hampshire, was granted as Pennacook Plantation on January 17, 1725 and was incorporated as Rumford on February 9, 1734. The name was changed to Concord in 1765 to reflect the concord reached with the Bow Treaty.
The beginnings of Rumford, Maine can be traced back to 1652 to a boundary dispute between the Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire colonies. This complicated issue was not settled for more than 100 years and left a number of citizens of the present day Concord, New Hampshire, deprived of their land holdings. These people, who become known as the "sufferers" because of the loss of their lands, eventually petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a tract of uninhabited land in the District of Maine. The request was finally granted in 1774, and the area was settled as New Pennacook Plantation, the name it held until its incorporation as Rumford in 1800.
The town was settled as an agricultural and lumbering community and remained as such for more than 100 years. In 1899 Hugh J. Chisholm open Continental bag Company and in 1901, the first paper machine was started at the Oxford Paper Company. Chisholm saw the Rumford Falls as an opportunity to produce power, and it was that power that led to paper making in Rumford. The paper industry transformed the agricultural community of 898 people in 1890 to an industrial center of almost 7,000 people twenty years later in 1910. Rumford's population peaked in 1940 with approximately 10,500 residents.