Sept. 14
– Sept. 14, 1909: The New Hampshire State Sanatorium on the side of Mt. Moosilauke admits its first tuberculosis patient – hopeful of benefiting from the mountain air, as are the thousands of patients who will follow. Known as the Glencliff Sanatorium, the state-run facility will serve its last patient in 1970. It is now the Glencliff Home for the Elderly.
– Sept. 14, 1858: The selectmen of Jefferson warn residents in a newspaper advertisement of a poor woman in search of a handout: “This is give notice that Melissa Ingerson, one of the town’s poor in Jefferson, having left the place provided for her by said town, all persons are forbid harboring or trusting her, as said town will pay no bills of her contracting.”
Sept. 15
– Sept. 15, 1860: Concord celebrates the opening of Auburn Street. Several hundred residents join in a carriage procession, led by the Concord Cornet Band, from the Eagle hotel, up Centre Street to Auburn. Two large flags suspended across the new street draw hearty salutes. The march continues to Little Pond Road. One speaker says the new road suggests indications of our progress in civilization.
– Sept. 15, 1900: A train wreck near Weirs Beach demolishes two locomotives and kills two men.
– Sept. 15, 1860: Mayor Simon Willard and the Concord Cornet Band lead a carriage procession of several hundred people up the newly opened Auburn Street. An evangelistic preacher and promoter named John G. Hook has laid out 11 streets with house lots in the woods of the city’s West End.
Sept. 16
– Sept. 16, 1820: John George of Concord has raised a radish weighing 3 pounds ½ ounce and measuring 13¾ inches in diameter.
– Sept. 16, 1856: The Coos Republican reports that Mr. S.F. Spaulding of Lancaster killed a young bear near his house on Aug. 31, and then discovered another in his oat field on Sept. 7. “He seized his rifle and gave the contents to him, which proved a little harder to digest than oats. He weighed 368 lbs. They are very plenty this season and have made sad havoc among the cattle, sheep and grain.”
Sept. 17
– Sept. 17, 1967: The Mount Washington Cog Railway goes out of control and plunges into a gorge, killing eight passengers and injuring 74 others. A Public Utilities Commission investigation will decide that the accident occurred because the crew failed to notice an open switch. “The primary cause of the accident was human error,” the commission reports. The last previous death on the Cog Railway occurred in 1929.
– Sept. 17, 1847: With 85 recruits for the 9th Regiment, Lieutenant Charles F. Low, son of Concord’s renowned General Joseph Low, sails for Vera Cruz, Mexico, and the seat of war.
– Sept. 17, 1787: John Langdon and Nicholas Gilman, New Hampshire’s delegates to the constitutional convention at Philadelphia, sign the U.S. Constitution.
Sept. 18
– Sept. 18, 1819: John Langdon dies at the age of 78 in his mansion in Portsmouth. He was a leading American Revolutionary and a delegate to the convention that adopted the U.S. Constitution. He served as president of the Senate in 1789, both informing George Washington that he had been elected president and escorting John Adams to his seat at the head of the Senate after his election as vice president. Langdon was also a six-term governor.
– Sept. 18, 1886: Three decades after the first “Shaker socks” were produced, large mill production has spoiled their reputation, according to Wade’s Fibre & Fabric, a trade journal. “Anyone who was acquainted with the original production could hardly be brought to believe that the average stocking bearing the Shaker label, ever came from a Shaker community,” Wade’s reports. Commercial competition has “brought them from a high standard to the very lowest in the market.”
– Sept. 18, 1765: Speaking from the balcony of the wooden statehouse in Portsmouth’s Market Square, George Meserve tells an angry mob that he resigned nine days ago as royal Stamp Act agent (tax collector). The crowd cheers lustily. Nevertheless, Meserve will sleep with a loaded pistol at his bedside for several weeks.
– Sept. 18, 1679: King Charles II ordains that as of Jan. 1, 1680, New Hampshire will have its own government. He names John Cutt, a wealthy Portsmouth merchant, the first governor.
Sept. 19
– Sept. 19, 1864: Colonel Alexander Gardiner, commander of the 14th New Hampshire volunteer infantry regiment, is mortally wounded at the Battle of Winchester, Va. Before the war, Gardiner had traveled west to Kansas, where border ruffians destroyed the newspaper and printing office he was running. At the outbreak of the war he was a lawyer in Claremont.
– Sept. 19, 1901: On the day of President McKinley’s funeral, the town of Bristol suspends all business and schools. A portrait of the late president is placed on an easel in Central Square. The Methodist Episcopal church holds a memorial service with a life-sized picture of McKinley in front of the pulpit.
Sept. 20
– Sept. 20, 1928: Donald Hall is born. He will celebrate his grandfather’s Wilmot farm in a New Yorker article called String to Short to Be Saved and return to live on the farm as a poet.
– Sept. 20, 1976: The UNH Commission on the Status of Women reports that of 147 full professors in Durham, only two are women.
