Sam Staples Auctions New Hampshire Property at the Middlesex

In this 1864 broadside, auctioneer Sam Staples announced the upcoming auction at the Middlesex Hotel of pasture land in New Hampshire. In his biography of Staples for Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord: Fourth Series, from 1895 to 1909, John Shepard Keyes wrote the following about the local real estate opportunities that the auction business afforded his astute subject: “His business as auctioneer, which was largely that of sales in this town, gave him many opportunities of getting a bargain, and he speculated in real estate to a considerable extent. When, after the death of ‘Ebby’ Hubbard, the old house next to the Orthodox Church [the Trinitarian Congregational Church on Walden Street] was torn down, and Hubbard Street was laid out, Staples was the originator and active manager of that improvement. In the sale of lots he became a purchaser of several of these, and built a house on one of them. He owned half a dozen wood lots in the different parts of the town, and traded in the wood and lumber on others.”