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. 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, 2001: The Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests announces the most ambitious statewide conservation project in a century. The plan would protect an additional 1 million acres from development by 2025, nearly doubling the amount of space already set aside in New Hampshire.
Sept. 22, 1849: Asked to change Concord from a town to a city, local voters say no, by a vote of 637 against and 183 in favor. Four years later, they’ll change their mind.
Sept. 23, 2001: In six months, the Lakes Region Conservation Trust has collected more than half the $6.4 million it needs to preserve the 5,000 acres at Castle in the Clouds, the Monitor reports.
Sept. 24, 2003: Former governor Hugh Gregg, 85, a respected patriarch of the state Republican Party and a tireless promoter of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, dies at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon after a brief illness.
Sept. 25, 2003: In Concord, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announces that New Hampshire will build a new emergency management center, thanks to a $9.1 million grant.
Sept. 25, 2002: Two people are killed, including flight instructor Alan Emerson of Gilford, when their small plane crashes into Lake Winnipesaukee.
Sept. 25, 2001: After almost a year since they last piled into the Belknap County Superior Court, more than a dozen lawyers for the country’s leading cigarette companies are back in Laconia, arguing pretrial issues in the multimillion dollar lawsuits brought by four New Hampshire families.
Sept. 26, 2003: A heating oil truck overturns and slides down a hilly road near Ellacoya State Park in Gilford. After crashing into roadside trees, two cracks in the tank spill some 2,500 gallons of fuel into a brook that flows into Lake Winnipesaukee.
Sept. 26, 2002: Superior court judge Kenneth McHugh issues a ruling that Sanbornton must give back the additional taxes it’s been collecting on 125 waterfront properties since 1999 because the selectmen increased their assessments unfairly.
Sept. 26, 1906: Whitney Barrett, a police officer, chases down 30-year-old Julia Chadwick and, despite her pleas for help, manages to shoot and kill her in a trolley in Penacook. He then turns the gun on himself. Though married with two children, Barrett had been infatuated with Chadwick.
Sept. 27, 2003: Episcopal dioceses in Pennsylvania and Texas accuse the national church of exceeding its authority and violating its own constitution by confirming its first openly gay bishop, the Rev. Gene Robinson of Weare, and approving the blessing of same-sex unions. “These acts are to be held null and void, and of no effect, in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh,” reads a resolution approved 239-69 by the delegates in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
