The name itself reflects how the place began. In 1750, German immigrants from Pennsylvania and Scots-Irish settlers arguing over the location of a county seat finally agreed on a central spot. They named the result Concord, after the harmony that the compromise required. The Cabarrus County Courthouse, completed in 1876, still stands at the heart of downtown; it now houses the Cabarrus Arts Council and the Davis Theater. The North Union Street and South Union Street historic districts preserve much of the nineteenth-century commercial fabric. Older still are the German Reformed and Lutheran churches scattered through the surrounding countryside, some founded in the 1740s by the families who would give Concord its first generations.

In 1799, twelve-year-old Conrad Reed found a seventeen-pound rock in Little Meadow Creek on his father John's farm just outside Concord. The family used it as a doorstop for three years before a Fayetteville jeweler identified it as gold and bought it for $3.50. (Its actual value was closer to $3,600.) The Reed Gold Mine, now a state historic site, marks the first documented gold discovery in the United States and the beginning of the country's first gold rush. By the 1830s the federal government had built a branch mint in Charlotte to handle the bullion. The mine site is still on the National Register of Historic Places, a quiet reminder that the Carolina piedmont was once America's California.

When Bruton Smith and Curtis Turner broke ground on Charlotte Motor Speedway in July 1959, they did it just outside Concord, on flat farmland next to U.S. Route 29. The track took eleven months to build and bankrupted itself twice in its first decade, but it survived. Over the following half-century the racing economy spread out from the speedway like a delta. Hendrick Motorsports, founded by Rick Hendrick in 1984, became the most successful organization in NASCAR history; its campus in Concord includes its own museum. The NASCAR Research and Development Office sits nearby. So does Motor Racing Network, the radio broadcasting arm of NASCAR. The Coca-Cola 600 weekend in May fills hotels for fifty miles.

Tourism that started with motorsports has expanded into something broader. Concord Mills, opened in 1999, is the largest tourist attraction in North Carolina by visitor count, drawing more annual traffic than the Biltmore Estate. Great Wolf Lodge built one of its indoor water park resorts here. The combination of speedway, mall, and water park makes the I-85 exits in northern Cabarrus County one of the most reliable revenue streams in the state's tourism economy. The Cabarrus Arena & Events Center hosts everything from livestock shows to gun shows to high school graduations, including the ten that the speedway itself hosted during the COVID-19 pandemic when traditional ceremonies were impossible.

Concord's three sister cities, designated by Sister Cities International, are Killarney in County Kerry, Ireland; Freeport in the Bahamas; and Siena in Tuscany. The choices say something about how the city sees itself: tied to the Scots-Irish heritage of its Presbyterian founders, attentive to vacation economies, and aware that even a county seat in central North Carolina is reachable from anywhere in the world. Concord-Padgett Regional Airport (KJQF), publicly owned and operated by the city, handles charter aircraft, flight schools, private jets, and Allegiant Air commercial service to Florida and New Orleans. It also serves as the regular landing pad for the team jets that carry NASCAR's traveling road show in and out of the speedway every race weekend. The city moves fast. It always has.