Middlesex Hotel (Concord, Mass.)

Concord, Mass., hotel that once stood on the corner of the Mill Dam and Monument Square, opposite the Wright Tavern. Hotel on the site existed prior to 1789, when John Richardson traded his house for the hotel then held by Middlesex County to house jailers and county court officials. The hotel was a center of town and county life in the period when the county courts were held at Concord and prior to the arrival of the railroad in the early 1840's. In 1825, Richardson sold the hotel to Thomas D. Wesson. (For some time prior to its sale by Richardson, Ebenezer Thompson had occupied and managed.

(Cont.) the place, which was consequently referred to as Thompson's Hotel.) The hotel burned in 1845. Wesson rebuilt it in 1846, but the removal of the county courts, the replacement of stage travel by the railroad, and the decision by the town not to allow the serving of liquor at the hotel led to a decline in business. After Wesson, the hotel passed through a succession of proprietors (Heman Newton, Samuel A. Hartshorn, and Davis and Todd among them) before it was sold to George Heywood, who leased it to James W. Jacobs, proprietor until it closed its doors forever in the fall of 1882.

(Cont.) Having remained vacant for close to two decades, the hotel was sold in 1900 to Stedman Buttrick, Edward Waldo Emerson, Richard F. Barrett, and Prescott Keyes, who sold it and the accompanying land to the Town of Concord. The building was demolished, the land it occupied having been designated for municipal memorial purposes.