Sept. 17, 1987: The poet Robert Lowell dies. He has family ties in Dunbarton, where he will be buried. His epitaph: “The immortal is scraped unconsenting from the mortal.”
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.
Sept. 18, 2000: The impeachment trial of Supreme Court Chief Justice David Brock begins in the state Senate. He will eventually be acquitted.
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, 1987: In Concord, Elizabeth Dole defends her decision to quit her job as U.S. transportation secretary to help her husband, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, run for president.
Sept. 18, 1990: Steven McAuliffe testifies on behalf of Supreme Court nominee David Souter before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee: “In David Souter’s attorney general’s office we sought the right answer, not the expedient answer – and never the political answer,” McAuliffe says.
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. 19, 2001: Concord Planning Board approves the renovation of the Riverbend Community Mental Health’s building on North State Street The building is the former home of the Concord Monitor and was donated to the agency in 1999. The project will involve tearing down a 1969 addition that housed the newspaper’s printing press.
Sept. 19, 1864: Col. 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, 1922: Walter Peterson is born. He will be a state representative, speaker of the House, governor and president of the 1974 constitutional convention.
Sept. 19, 1989: After nearly two years of shoulder problems, St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Tewksbury wins his first major league game since 1987. It is also his first major league shutout, a 5-0 four-hitter over the Montreal Expos.
Sept. 20, 1992: The first Sunday Monitor is published.
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
Sept. 21, 1846: Lt. Joseph H. Potter of Concord, a West Point classmate of Ulysses S. Grant, is wounded while storming a battery with his regiment at the battle of Monterey. He writes: “I was shot through the leg about two inches below the knee – the ball passing between the two bones of the leg and out the opposite side.”
Sept. 21, 1938: A giant hurricane roars through Concord. One thousand electric poles are downed and Concord Electric’s Sewalls Falls station is flooded. No power can be generated. Eighty percent of the trees in parks, cemeteries and streets are destroyed in what one account describes as “six shrieking hours of wind.”
Sept. 21, 1838: A Mr. Lauriat displays his hot air balloon in Concord. He takes off from the State House plaza, touches down at Shaker Village in Canterbury and then off again to Northfield. He travels 16 miles in 1½ hours – the greatest recorded speed in the area!
Sept. 22, 2003: Police arrest Jeffrey W. Gelinas, 27, of Barrington, for prowling and loitering. Gelinas is also the prime suspect in the “Jack the Snipper” case in Durham, where a man snuck into women’s apartments near the University of New Hampshire and removed their clothes as they slept.
Sept. 22, 1958: In a letter accepting the resignation of his scandal-hounded special assistant, Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower writes: “Your performance has been brilliant; the public has been the beneficiary of your unselfish work.”
Sept. 22, 1991: Refurbished and restored through a community effort, the City Auditorium re-opens with a gala variety show.
