A Concord Establishment: the Middlesex Hotel in Place

Baker and hotelkeeper John Richardson came to Concord in the late 1770s and either constructed a new building or (as suggested by the research of Concord historian Ruth Robinson Wheeler) enlarged an existing one that ultimately became the Catholic rectory. He soon exchanged that building, in which he had kept a tavern, and some land behind it to Middlesex County for the next property south, then owned by the county.

The tavern that he traded became the new County House, where jailers and sheriffs lived, and the property behind it was used for a stone county jail—no longer standing—over which Richardson was appointed the original jailer, and in which Henry David Thoreau spent one night in the summer of 1846. Richardson expanded the former county building on the lot closer to the Mill Dam (now Main Street) into the successful operation eventually known as the Middlesex Hotel.

The old Dr. Timothy Minot House and the adjacent county-owned building that Richardson acquired and renovated stood on property that in the seventeenth century had belonged to the Reverend Peter Bulkeley—a founder and the first minister of Concord—and where the retroactive purchase of Concord land by English settlers from the land's indigenous inhabitants was signed in 1637. Questions remain about the chronology and details of the removal of the Minot House, which is clearly visible in Amos Doolittle’s depiction of the Monument Square area in 1775, just a few years before John Richardson came to Concord.