Feb. 7, 1811: Nathaniel White is born in Lancaster. He will come to Concord to run a hotel and become a successful businessman. He will be a prominent abolitionist, working with William Lloyd Garrison, an early proponent of women’s suffrage and the Prohibition candidate for governor of New Hampshire in 1875. Among many other charitable acts, he will be a prime benefactor of the Centennial Home for the aged, now the Centennial Inn.
Feb. 7, 1986: As a memorial to Christa McAuliffe, the Concord High teacher who died during the Challenger launch, a new state trust fund is formed to allow other teachers to take “journeys of discovery and enlightenment.”
Feb. 7, 2000: After 31 years, WKXL talk-show host Gardner Hill airs his final edition of Party Line. The Concord station’s owner has decided to hire a new radio personality. “Nooooooo Gardner,” one woman calls in to say. “This is ridiculous,” another adds. “I can’t say that I’m shocked, but I am disgusted.”
Feb. 8, 1847: Franklin Pierce addresses a large meeting called in Concord to advocate “a vigorous and determined prosecution of the war with Mexico. Pierce will win a brigadier general’s commission, and his war exploits will help propel him to the presidency in 1852.
Feb. 8, 1897: Concord’s first movie plays at White’s Opera House. The show includes bathers at Rahway, N.J., a watermelon-eating contest, a mounted policeman stopping a runaway horse and a three-minute boxing match featuring Gentleman Jim Corbett. “There is nothing fake about it,” the Monitor reviewer reports, adding that the pictures are “vivid and truthful.”
Feb. 8, 1943: The crew of nine women running the sawmill at Turkey Pond is forced to shut down the operation until the pond thaws. The women have been working at the mill since October and all vow to return in May. Timber boss Howard E. Ahlskog says the women are more loyal and dependable than the last male crews he hired.
Feb. 9, 1986: Former U.S. Senate majority leader Howard Baker names Tom Rath of Concord to direct his 1988 presidential campaign. The campaign will flounder in March 1987, however, when Baker calls it off upon becoming President Reagan’s chief of staff.
Feb. 9, 1988: Fresh from a first-place finish in Iowa, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole takes a hard anti-Communist line in a Concord campaign appearance. He warns against “glasnost fever,” saying: “Whatever glasnost is, it is not democracy. Whatever else Gorbachev may be, he is still a hard-as-nails Communist.”
Feb. 9. 2001: Concord High sophomore Rachel Umberger wins the 300-meter and 1,000-meter runs at the state Indoor Track and Field Championships. As a team, the Tide finishes fifth overall.
Feb. 10, 1927: The Schoonmaker Chair Co. signs a seven-year contract to use New Hampshire state prison inmates to make chairs. The company will pay 15 cents per man-hour.
Feb. 10, 1992: Concord Mayor Bill Veroneau privately tells embattled City Manager Jim Smith that it is time for Smith to resign. In his latest scrape with councilors and residents, Smith’s slowness in sounding the alarm on a property tax shortfall made him a political target in the November election. He will take Veroneau’s advice and leave the job after 13 years.
Feb. 11, 1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints John G. Winant of Concord to succeed Joseph Kennedy as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Winant, a Republican, is a former governor and served earlier in FDR’s presidency as the first administrator of the Social Security Administration.
Feb. 11, 2000: A Massachusetts development company is considering building a large shopping center anchored by a supermarket on land in the South End, the Monitor reports. Working through a local real estate agent, the company has approached at least 10 different property owners in a triangular-shaped area between Hall and South Main streets near Exit 13 off Interstate 93.
Feb. 12, 1968: A thin, soft-spoken, curly-haired Harvard divinity student named Sam Brown arrives at 3 Pleasant St. in Concord, headquarters of the “peace” candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy. “The United States is now the great imperialist-aggressor nation of the world,” Brown tells an interviewer. He has come to town to lead scores of young visitors to the state in a one-month insurgency that will bring McCarthy to near-victory in New Hampshire and topple Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.
Feb. 12, 2004: Concord High wins the Division I boys’ Nordic skiing state championship classic race, with a combined score of 766 to Keene’s 748. The title is the first boys’ ski championship since 1992.
Feb. 13, 1788: New Hampshire delegates convene to consider the proposed U.S. Constitution. About two-thirds oppose it, and only after cajoling by Dr. Josiah Bartlett and other supporters do the delegates agree to reconvene in Concord in four months.
Feb. 13, 1849: Fire destroys all but the blacksmith shop of the Abbot & Downing coach factory in Concord. It will be rebuilt.
Feb. 13, 1932: Wearing a knitted toque (there are no more substantial headgear), Douglas Everett skates for the United States against Canada in the Olympic ice hockey final at Lake Placid. The teams tie 2-2. Canada, undefeated in the tournament, wins the gold medal. Everett will bring a silver medal home to Concord.
Feb. 13, 1952: Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and his wife Nancy arrive in Concord to begin a week of folksy campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. On Main Streets, at jalopy and sled dog races and at factory gates, he will meet this challenge from a campaign adviser: “I want you to promise that you’ll shake 500 hands a day between now and election time.”
Feb. 13, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson ejects three political activists from the National Caucus of Labor Committees from the State House press room, where they planned a press conference. “You didn’t ask me, and I’m the governor,” Thomson says. Attorney General Warren Rudman isn’t impressed. “Theoretically, the press room is a public room. What the governor has to do with it is beyond me,” he says.
Feb. 13, 1992: In a show of fitness aimed at reassuring voters about his health, Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas takes a very public swim at the Concord YMCA. With photographers and TV cameras recording his workout, he swims several laps freestyle, then sends an aide to find him someone to race. When no one can be found, he does a 50-yard butterfly sprint on his own.
Feb. 13, 1996: At the Monitor a week before the New Hampshire primary, Bob Dole says he is the one candidate who can provide “adult leadership.”
