The People Behind the Hotel
The entrepreneurial John Richardson was involved in multiple business ventures, including the tannery on the Mill Dam, and owned a number of hotels and stables in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His early Middlesex Hotel was a three-story structure, featuring a barroom heated by a stove, a large dining room, a smaller private dining rooms and parlors, a kitchen on the first floor, a public room on the second (a favorite resort for town officials), and a dance hall (complete with dressing room) occupying a full half of the third. The main access to Richardson’s building was at its rounded southeast corner. A porch along the first floor is visible in John Warner Barber’s engraving of Monument Square as it looked in 1839.
Richardson was the sole proprietor of the hotel for a time, and then placed it in the care of a series of managers: Major Paine, Tilly Buttrick, Colonel Simonds, and finally Ebenezer Thompson. He moved away from Concord in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Thompson occupied and operated the place for about ten years prior to its sale by Richardson in the mid-1820s. Under Thompson’s management, the building was referred to as Thompson’s Hotel.
In 1825, Richardson sold the hotel to Thomas D. Wesson and Gershom Fay, who managed it for several years. Fay then sold his interest to Wesson, a genial and well-liked man who, during the hotel’s heyday (1825-1845), clashed with locals over temperance, which for part of his ownership necessitated his operating in conflict with regulations. In 1839, Wesson's daughter Lucinda married Sam Staples. Staples was barkeeper and manager of Wesson’s establishment.
