May 24, 1844: Samuel F.B. Morse, who began his career as a Concord mechanic, sends the first message over his electro-magnetic telegraph. The previous year, Congress appropriated $30,000 to test the machine on a line laid from Washington to Baltimore. New Hampshireman Benjamin Brown French, who will soon join Morse and others in the Magnetic Telegraph Co., calls it “one of the greatest inventions of the age” and predicts it will “eventually be laid down all over the Union.”
May 25, 1817: An infant son of William H. Gage is drowned in the canal opposite a saw shop in Penacook. The body will be recovered nine days later in the Merrimack River, 7 miles away.
May 25, 1944: The Monitor’s lead photograph on page one, an illustration of the state’s severe labor shortage, shows three blind men working at the New England Briar Pipe Co. in Penacook.
May 26, 1944: After several destructive incidents, the police join school officials in urging young people not to play with handmade grenades. The grenades are filled with carriage bolts and use match-heads for the explosive charge. Children have been reported making and throwing them throughout the city.
May 27, 2002: For the 26th straight year, the Concord boys’ tennis team reaches the Class L semifinals. They get to the Final Four with an 8-1 victory over No. 7 Portsmouth at Memorial Field.
May 28, 1996: U.S. Sen. Bob Smith tours Concord’s so-called “crud corridor,” 440 acres of mostly unsightly and underutilized buildings near Interstate 93. Smith supports the city’s bid for a $200,000 federal grant to identify contamination along the corridor, much of which the city will successfully redevelop into an “opportunity corridor.”
May 29, 1944: Fourteen of the 46 conscientious objectors working as attendants at the State Hospital in Concord go on a cafeteria strike, refusing to eat. The men, who are labeled “Conchies,” are protesting a rule forbidding them to mingle with regular attendants at the hospital.
May 30, 1874: A city council committee is appointed to purchase land on Warren Street between State and Green streets for a central fire station. The committee will buy the site for $7,747.52, and the station will operate there for a century.