The Hotel's Ill-Fated Reopening

Advertisements for a series of balls at the newly-reopened Middlesex Hotel.

The reopening of the Middlesex Hotel was celebrated with a ball on April 20, 1846. Despite his optimism, Wesson was unable to make a success of the new place. The convenience and speed of railroad travel decimated business, as did the loss to Lowell by the late 1840s of two terms of the Court of Common Pleas. The remaining courts were eventually also removed from Concord in 1867. Wesson chose the ill-suited Colburn Hadlock to manage his new hotel.

From its reopening until its final closing in the early 1880s, the hotel passed through a rapid succession of owners—among them Heman Newton and a partner in 1854, Marshall Davis and George W. Todd, later a Boston liquor merchant (so described by John Shepard Keyes), Abel G. and Julia Heywood, and finally, in 1875, George Heywood (who obtained the place by foreclosing on the mortgage)—and of managers and business proprietors—Ashley and Doton after Hadlock, then Doton alone, Samuel A. Hartshorn, William Wood, and James W. Jacobs, who ran the hotel until it closed its doors for good in 1882.

Toward the end of the Middlesex Hotel’s operation, the town added to the problems of the place by its unwillingness to allow the serving of liquor there. The coup de grâce was delivered in 1881, when the Middlesex suffered another major fire that destroyed its stable and threatened to ignite the tinderbox of the hotel itself, which was saved only by the vigorous exertions of firefighters.