Daniel B. Wesson - Residences

Residences

In 1886, Daniel Wesson built a summer home in Northborough, Massachusetts called Wesson Terrace. Now called White Cliffs, it is owned by the La Cava family and is a function facility often used for weddings, wedding showers, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, Northborough's Annual Winter Ball, and gatherings for various local associations.

Wesson also lived and worked in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, building hospitals and a home there. In 1966 his Springfield home, owned at the time by the Colony Club, was destroyed by fire.

The summer house he built in Northborough, Massachusetts was on land belonging to his wife's family. He was apprenticed in Northborough at his brother's gunsmith shop until his brother died. Having learned the gun trade in town, as well as having a wife from town, Daniel Baird Wesson returned with his wife to build a summer house there.

It was not the first mansion built by the wealthy inventor/industrialist. 13 houses (mansions) were constructed for him but White Cliffs is the only remaining Wesson mansion. The others having all been destroyed, mostly by fires.

The summer house benefited from his numerous European trips. He was an avid admirer of the Medici period, and family, in Italy, and had a few of the Countess's rooms dismantled and rebuild in Northborough. Smith and Wesson guns were worldwide. This was from their licensing agreements set up with foreign countries and rulers to mass-produce them for their armies. S&W sidearms were desired sidearms in many foreign armies, including the armies of the Russian Czar.

White Cliffs was named for the "White Cliffs" of England, especially in the Dover area. He had a painting of the magnificent white-chalk-cliffs there that he placed over the mantle that faced the main entrance. It is for this that the residence was called White Cliffs; even though at their time it was not a white building.

Wesson Terrace is actually a small development built in the 1950s-60s nearby. The only association of this and D.B. Wesson is that it was built above a brick aqueduct system, which supplied White Cliffs, that crossed the top of this New England hill. Wesson Terrace was bought by the Tomaiolo family in the 1930s and turned into the restaurant now known as "The White Cliffs." According to Teddy Tomaiolo, one of the brothers who ran the restaurant in the 1970s, the building had been called "The Cliffs" by local residents. But an Irish waitress who worked at the restaurant in its early years used to sing "The White Cliffs of Dover" while doing her prep work. The Tomaiolos liked the name and used it for their restaurant, eventually painting the exterior all white.