April 4, 1983: Concord City Clerk Marjorie Foote retires after 19 years on the job. “I knew just about everything that was going on with people in this city,” she recalls.
April 4, 2003: Two weeks into spring, the greater Concord area wakes up to 6.4 inches of snow and promises of more to come.
April 5, 2002: Charles Gravenhorst, a self-described pastor who hosts a late-night Christian show on Concord Community TV, is arrested on charges related to an alleged sexual assault in Maine.
April 6, 1853: City government is established in Concord.
April 6, 1993: For the first time, Concord’s Bob Tewksbury gets an opening day start, pitching for St. Louis at San Francisco. He loses but will soon be on track to a 17-win season.
April 7, 1830: A committee is formed in Concord to pursue the idea of an east-west railroad line through New Hampshire and Vermont. The first train will not reach the city for 12 years, and it will come north from Boston.
April 7, 1945: The Monitor reports on Page 1: “Masculine aggressiveness, which took a set-back last year when a girl grabbed the highly prized No. 1 city bicycle registration, came back strong this year to capture the first six plates issued by the police department this morning.” Nos. 1, 2 and 3 will get their picture on Page 1 the next afternoon.
April 7, 1965: The Monitor reports on plans for a new $1.2 million state liquor store on Storrs Street in Concord. “The state store is expected to become the first of its sort in the nation. Ohio has featured self-service liquor stores for a dozen years, but they have not also featured specialty liquors and wines, as planned in the model Concord store.”
April 7, 1968: About 350 people attend a memorial service on the State House plaza for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who was assassinated three days earlier in Memphis. In a statement drafted in conjunction with other local clergy, Rev. Paul Beattie, a Unitarian minister, suggests that nearly all-white Concord should actively seek to diversify. “Concord is an ideal town for developing a full inter-racial community,” he says. “We do not have a ghetto. We do not have a street where all or most Negroes live.” He suggests that Concord invite to town “some of the black people who have lost all hope while living in the segregated squalor of urban centers.”
April 7, 2000: Robert Blair, who murdered his wife and her young son in a Concord motel in 1996, has told the police he also killed two people in Rutland, Vt., in 1983, the Rutland Herald reports. Detectives there, however, will find no evidence of the killings in the location Blair described.
April 8, 1939: From the “More Things Change Department”: A Monitor headline announces “Two-Monikered Streets Cause Befuddlement.” The reporter, describing plans to rename dozens of city streets, notes calmly: “There’s no hurry about this proposition, of course. Most of the streets have gone by their names for many years and couple more won’t hurt.”
April 9, 1975: State representatives from Concord say they have mixed feelings about a plan by Gov. Mel Thomson to convert the Pleasant View home into a treatment center for the criminally insane. (It won’t happen.)
April 9, 1991: After two consecutive days when the temperature reached 85 degrees, Concord settles for a high of 77. It’s apparently a big year for hot streaks: The city enjoyed another historic heat wave at the beginning of February.
April 9, 2000: A party at Rundlett Middle School brings together longtime Concord-area residents with immigrants and refugees who are more recent arrivals. The event is part of a broader effort that educational, social service and business organizations hope will eventually lead to the creation of a multicultural center.
April 9, 2003: In a rally at the State House, state employees and several hundred supporters attack Gov. Craig Benson’s proposed state cuts, rallying against a plan that would freeze wages and send their health care costs soaring.
April 10, 1829: While addressing a Merrimack County jury in Concord, the spellbinding lawyer Ezekiel Webster, brother of Daniel, drops dead. “He had spoken nearly a half hour, in full and unaltering voice, when the hand of death arrested his earthly course,” writes Judge Charles Corning.
April 10, 1865: A huge celebration in Concord marks the end of the Civil War. Mayor Moses Humphrey orders the city’s fire engines decorated and ready to move to the State House by 4:30 p.m. Bands play, cannons boom, church bells peal. After nightfall, there is a “general illumination” of the city and a 400-gun salute is fired.
April 10, 1991: The Concord planning board rejects a plan by developer Barry Stem to build a hotel and conference center on Broken Ground. It is just one segment of his development project, which also includes an 18-hole golf course and nearly 500 luxury homes. None of it will ever be built.
April 10, 2001: The police arrest a Penacook man and charge him with arson and burglary in connection with recent vandalism at the United Church of Penacook.