4. Jarvis on the Early Middlesex Hotel

Edward Jarvis - physician, historian of Concord, and (like Lemuel Shattuck) a social statistician - had a personal as well as a historical interest in the Middlesex Hotel. His father, Deacon Francis Jarvis, had lived while young in the household of John Richardson in Watertown. In 1789, young Francis Jarvis came to Concord with Richardson, from whom he had learned the baker's trade. Francis Jarvis worked in Richardson's Concord tavern before setting up a bakery business with Thomas Safford in the Wright Tavern building in 1790.

In his manuscript Houses and People in Concord, Jarvis wrote about the early history of the Middlesex Hotel - initially called the "Jail Tavern" - acquired by Richardson in exchange for the building next door (the County House after it passed into Middlesex County ownership, now the Catholic rectory at 70 Monument Square). Jarvis's description of the structure that would become the Middlesex Hotel matches the building as depicted in Amos Doolittle's 1775 engraving of the center of Concord.