– Sept. 7, 1929 – Patrick Griffiths of 10½ Walker St. in Concord pedals to a stop in the State House plaza at 12:03 a.m. with a new endurance record for continuous bicycling. His time of 65 hours, 33 minutes breaks the record by 33 minutes. Motorists surrounding the State House plaza honk their horns in tribute to the new mark.
– Sept. 8, 1820 – Abel Merrill, 73, dies in Concord. “He went to bed apparently well, and before midnight was a corpse,” Nathaniel Bouton writes in his book “ The History of Concord.”
– Sept. 9, 1842 – The rail line between Boston and Concord opens. Two years later, it will carry 73,000 passengers and 43,000 tons of freight.
– September 10, 1861 – Fire destroys the railroad storage barns and many cars of the Concord and Northern railroads.
– September 11, 1866 – Kearsarge beats Portsmouth 32-19 in one of the first reported games of “base ball” in Concord. Judge Ira Eastman, however, remembers seeing the game (or its forerunner, rounders) played in the city 50 years before.
– September 12, 1841 – In an unscheduled lecture, Stephen S. Foster, a Canterbury abolitionist, holds forth during a meeting at the Old North Church. When he won’t stop talking, several men escort him out.
– Sept. 13, 1913 – Harry K. Thaw, a wealthy, prominent New Yorker who murdered one of the country’s foremost architects, Stanford White, arrives in Concord. Thaw was convicted, escaped from prison and was recaptured in Canada. He was brought back across the border and is being held under house arrest at the Eagle Hotel on Main Street. His case will be tangled up in court until December 1914. In the meantime, he will pass the summer of 1914 at a resort in Gorham.
