9. The Middlesex Hotel in 1839, from Barber’s Engraving

John Warner Barber’s rendering of Monument Square in 1839, engraved by J. Downes and published in Barber’s Historical Collections (1840), includes an image of the original Middlesex Hotel building, which burned in 1845. Comparison between this detail from the engraving and later photographs of the reconstructed Middlesex Hotel confirms John Shepard Keyes’s observation that the post-fire version of the building was very similar to the pre-fire version.

The Barber engraving clearly shows the copper globe hanging above the southeast corner entrance to the original building—a feature mentioned by John Shepard Keyes in a manuscript history of the hotel, written as the place was being taken down in 1900 (see no. 42).

Note the orientation toward the Mill Dam of the First Parish, which in 1841 was turned around to face Lexington Road.