June 7, 1765: The provincial government grants Concord a royal charter. Since 1733, the town had been called Rumford, and before that, under a 1725 Massachusetts charter, Penny-Cook.
June 7, 1965: To celebrate the city's bicentennial, Concord leaders bury a time capsule in the State House plaza, to be reopened on June 7, 2015. Among the items inside: marble from the giant railroad station demolished in 1961 and wood from the State House dome.
June 7, 1900: Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York speaks to the graduation luncheon at St. Paul's School. The future president tells the boys: “No fooling, no shirking, and hit the line hard.”
June 8, 1941: Yankee third baseman Red Rolfe of Penacook hits a homer in the first game of New York's doubleheader sweep at Cleveland. Rolfe's teammate, Joe DiMaggio, homers twice in the first game and has two hits in the second. His hitting streak now stands at 24 games.
June 8, 1798: State House chaplain Joshua Heywood is fired after two days on the job. His infraction: failure to pray for President John Adams.
June 9, 1909: The cornerstone is laid for the New Hampshire Historical Society's building on Park Street. It will be more than two years before the building is finished.
June 9, 1846: The cannon on Sand Hill in Concord booms the news that John Parker Hale of Dover, an anti-slavery leader, has been elected to the U.S. Senate.
June 9, 1986: Gov. John Sununu vetoes legislation aimed at reforming porce laws. He objects to the establishment of a $321,000 marital magistrate bureaucracy.
June 10, 1900: A Concord police officer arrests clerk Walter Davis at Fitch's Drug Store for selling soda water on Sunday. The law allows for Sunday sales of only “bread, milk and the other necessities of life.” A judge will let Davis off, saying that soda is as necessary to life as milk and that citizens should be encouraged to drink anything other than alcoholic beverages.
June 11, 1837: Samuel Coffin Eastman is born in Concord. A great-grandson of Ebenezer Eastman, Concord's first settler, he will become a prominent lawyer, bank president, railroad man, speaker of the New Hampshire House and school board member. In 1915, when Concord celebrates the 150th anniversary of its royal charter as a parish, he will be recognized as the city's most prominent citizen and “president of the day.”
June 12, 1886: The Daniel Webster statue is dedicated in front of the State House.
June 12, 1977: In Concord, William Loeb tells the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that the only way to combat “anti-gun nuts” is “to go directly to the great mass of American people and educate them on the obvious necessity of citizens owning and having guns.”
June 12, 1804: Alarmed by the frequency of escapes from local prisons, Gov. John Gilman makes the first substantive proposal for a state prison in Concord. It will be more than eight years before the prison opens on North State and Tremont streets.
June 13, 1859: A huge fire on the southwest corner of Main and Pleasant streets in Concord consumes a bakery, several stores and the South Congregational Church. When it becomes certain that the fire will destroy the granite-and-wood Greek Revival church, the Rev. Henry Parker gives one final pull to the church bell rope, and the bell is heard above the crackle of flames.
June 13, 1767: With pomp and circumstance, John Wentworth assumes the office of royal governor in Portsmouth. As such, he will lead an agrarian and mercantile colony of 98 towns totaling 52,000 people. The population of Concord, characterized by one historian as “an outpost of radical republicanism,” is 752
June 13, 1957: President Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints James M. Langley, editor and publisher of the Concord Daily Monitor, to be U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Langley will hold the job for just over two years.
June 13, 1833: With several of his pupils, Samuel Gridley Howe, a Boston surgeon renowned for his work with the blind, demonstrates his techniques at New Hampshire's Representatives Hall. “The books used for the blind were exhibited, and the blind read from them with considerable facility,” one observer in the large crowd will write.
