30. Guests at the Middlesex for Emerson’s Funeral

A single guest register for the Middlesex Hotel survives in the library’s William Munroe Special Collections. This register includes entries for 1881 and 1882. Entries for Sunday, April 30, 1882—the day Ralph Waldo Emerson was buried—are bordered in black, an expression of mourning for Concord’s resident philosopher and man of letters.

Among those who signed the register that day was Moorfield Storey, a Harvard-educated lawyer, civil rights leader, and first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Storey returned to Concord in 1903 to take part in two centennial commemorations of Emerson’s birth—in May to speak at a celebration organized by the Social Circle in Concord (a men’s club to which Emerson had belonged), in July to deliver the lecture “Emerson and the Civil War” at the “Emerson Memorial School” sponsored by the Free Religious Association of America. Storey explored Emerson’s antislavery in the second speech, the original typescript of which is held by the Concord Free Public Library.

The guest register shows that George Willis Cooke—biographer and bibliographer of Emerson and author of An Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany The Dial—also patronized the Middlesex on the day of Emerson’s funeral.

A brief mention in The Concord Freeman for October 27, 1882 indicates that the Middlesex Hotel had been closed by the time that issue was printed. This register, which ends with the entry for August 3, 1882, is therefore probably the final one kept for the place. The absence of room numbers next to most of the names here shown suggests that by the time these entries were made, guests were visiting the hotel primarily for meals rather than lodging.