July 19, 1976: A consultant recommends that the state build a new $20 million prison on Clinton Street and phase out the North State Street facility by 1980. City officials are outraged. City Councilor David Rogers suggests the site is Gov. Mel Thomson's choice because it is “the residential area inhabited by many of his most outspoken critics.” (The plan never comes to fruition.)
July 19, 1832: Fearing a cholera epidemic that has entered the country from Europe and Canada, a special Concord town meeting elects a board of health. The board is granted power “to make all necessary arrangements and accommodations for sick strangers and for the comfort and safety of its own citizens.” Fears of the cholera epidemic will prove unfounded.
July 20, 1945: The Carmelite nuns, a cloistered order engaged in meditation, prayer and manual labor, plan a new foundation in Concord. They have acquired a site on Bridge Street and will move to the city from Roxbury, Mass. The order is named after Mount Carmel in Palestine, site of the first church dedicated to the Immaculate Mother of God. The order's first home in the United States was established in Baltimore in 1790.
July 20, 1817: President James Monroe attends church at “the Old North,” the Congregational church that stood on the site of the current Walker School.
July 21, 1927: State Education Commissioner Ernest W. Butterfield applauds the fact that most girls training to be teachers in the state's normal schools are of old New Hampshire stock. Girls of foreign parentage adapt poorly to rural living, he says, and are better off training as nurses or taking up commercial work. Louis J. Rundlett, Concord's superintendent of schools, concurs with Butterfield and adds that girls should start young in training as teachers. Only Manchester has an ordinance prohibiting married women from taking teaching positions, but Rundlett frowns on the idea as well. Although married women may understand children better, he says, single women should be given strong preference for teaching jobs because married women have their husbands to support them.
July 21, 1873: Meeting at city hall, the Congregationalist society of Concord votes to rebuild its church at North Main and Chapel streets. Three weeks earlier, a fire consumed the church.
July 21, 1892: The Snowshoe Club, one of Concord's many men's organizations, is founded. Its objects are “enjoyment of the beauties of nature; moral and social improvement; physical culture.”
July 21, 1878: A lightning bolt ignites the “Mother House,” the first building on the campus of 22-year-old St. Paul's School. Fire destroys the building, which houses classrooms, the dining hall and the offices of the rector and staff. The Rev. Henry Coit, the school's first rector, is determined that the fire not delay school. Two months later, school will open on time, with 204 boys enrolled.
July 22, 1862: A meeting is held in Concord in response to President Lincoln's call for 300,000 new volunteers throughout the Union states. The city decides it will put up a $50 bounty, in addition to state and federal bounties, for any Concord man who will enlist.
July 22, 1880: After a harsh 10-year reign as prison warden, John C. Pilsbury is cleared of charges of abuse and brutality. “The discipline of our prison is indeed strict,” Pilsbury says, “(but) I am satisfied it is none too severe for the good of the convicts.” Though exonerated, the 78-year-old Pilsbury will soon resign.
July 23, 1927: Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, who is scheduled to arrive in Concord two days from now on his triumphant tour around the country, lands at Concord airport. The reason: the airport in Portland, Maine, his scheduled stop, is fogged in.
July 25, 1927: A police squad of six officers enters the home of Ruth A. McKinnon on Runnels Road in Penacook. The officers arrest MacKinnon and confiscate 106 bottles of beer, empty pint and quart bottles and a capping machine. MacKinnon will be fined $100 and $41.10 in court costs and sentenced to 60 days in the house of corrections in Boscawen, but the sentence will be suspended. With her arrest, the police believe they have cut off the supply of liquor to this portion of Merrimack County.
