July 27, 2001: Five people are injured when two cars collide on Canobie Lake Park’s most popular roller coaster. State safety officials will find nothing mechanically wrong with the Salem ride, blaming operator error for the crash.
July 28, 1927: Nellie Taylor Ross, the nation’s first woman governor, stops at the Concord home of former New Hampshire governor John G. Winant. She is on her way to Tilton, where she will give a Chatauqua speech in the evening. The Monitor reports that Ross, the former governor of Wyoming, is “noted for her charming manner” and “travels in an expensive car, with her own chauffeur.”
July 29, 1964: Gov. John King establishes a traffic safety committee to “map a blueprint for a permanent continuing attack on the rising death and injury toll on New Hampshire highways.” By mid-August, 88 people will have died in New Hampshire traffic accidents that year.
July 30, 1868: A fierce tornado rips through the North Country town of Pittsburg, destroying trees and buildings.
July 31, 1854: Samuel Wilson, believed to be the original “Uncle Sam,” dies at 87. Brought up in Mason, he became a contractor and supplied meat to the army during the War of 1812. He was known as Uncle Sam and stamped his supply barrels U.S. Asked by passersby on a New York wharf what the U.S. stood for, one of Wilson’s workmen said, “Uncle Sam.” The name quickly spread.
August 1, 1990: Pamela Smart is arrested for arranging with her 16-year-old lover and two other boys to kill her husband Gregory the previous May. “I’ve been wrongly accused of a heinous crime,” Smart will tell Judge Douglas Gray at a bail hearing. After listening to a tape in which she incriminates herself, the judge will order her held without bail until her trial.
