John Shepard Keyes Gives a Talk About the Middlesex Hotel, 1900

John Shepard Keyes was one of a group of Concordians devoted to preserving and promoting local history who in 1886 established the Concord Antiquarian Society, known today as the Concord Museum. The collection of antiquarian Cummings E. Davis formed the nucleus of the society’s original collection. Its early programming included lectures about aspects of Concord’s past.

Born here in 1821, throughout his life an active community member, Judge Keyes delivered an informative and entertaining talk on the Middlesex Hotel before the Concord Antiquarian Society on April 2, 1900, as the hotel was being taken down. The manuscript of the speech survives in the library’s collection of John Shepard Keyes papers.

In his Middlesex Hotel talk, the almost octogenarian Keyes covered the entire history of the place, much of which had occurred within his lifetime. While the human story he tells rings true, some of his facts are only approximately accurate. For example, although he remembered that the ball on the reopening of the Middlesex Hotel after the 1845 fire took place on April 19, 1847, a printed ticket shows that the event took place on April 20, 1846 (see no. 15). Similarly, he dates the final closing of the Middlesex in 1883, but newspaper documentation shows that it actually shut down in 1882. Nevertheless, the piece is unparalleled in the level of detail it provides, in the author’s lack of inhibition about offering his opinions, and—because Keyes observed so much of the life of the hotel first-hand—in the sense of immediacy it affords.