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White Cliffs building

mansion in Massachusetts

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 9, 2026
Entity authorityQ136824557
Source-derived summary

The White Cliffs is a building at 167 Main Street in Northborough, Massachusetts. Designed by architect Benjamin Hammett Seabury, The Cliffs was built as a summer home for Daniel B. Wesson and his family and completed in 1886. The mansion has had a variety of uses including a home, a restaurant, and an event venue, before being purchased by the Town of Northborough in 2016.

History

Residence

Daniel Wesson had met his future wife Cynthia Hawes in Northborough in the 1840s. Cynthia wanted a summer home built on land her parents had owned, which was completed in 1886. The construction of the elaborate mansion cost $300,000 and involved European craftsmen. The Wessons used Northborough as a summer home until 1901.

Alfred Thomas purchased the property in 1910, using it as a summer home until 1926.

Restaurants and event venue

From 1946 to 1953, the Northboro Manor restaurant operated on the property. A $2 million renovation of the property as a private club was planned in 1953, but the project lacked funding.

Editorial summary

“White Cliffs building” enters the record as mansion in Massachusetts. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what White, Cliffs and building can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1886, 2016, 1901, 1910—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around White, Cliffs and building.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“White Cliffs building” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, White, Cliffs and building provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q136824557. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1886, 2016, 1901 and 1910.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow White Cliffs building primary sources, White Cliffs building archive and White research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from White Cliffs building” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.