This week in Concord history
July 21, 1857: The Coos Republican reports that Joseph Roby, 23, of Clarksville is struck and killed by a bolt of lightening while sitting in his house. “His cap and boots were torn in pieces, but no mark was found upon his person. Several individuals were in the house at the time, but none of the rest were injured materially.” July 21, 1861: Col. Gilman Marston of the Second New Hampshire Volunteers is shot in the shoulder at...
This week in Concord history
July 14, 1850: On a journey into the White Mountains seeking scenes to paint, New Hampshire artist Benjamin Champney writes to a friend in Fryeburg, Maine: “To our great surprise we saw a broad and beautiful valley bounded by lofty hills and the Saco winding through it with a thousand turns and luxuriant trees interspersed. In fact we found the beau ideal of a certain kind of scenery – a combination of the wild and cultivated,...
This week in Concord history
July 7, 1816: Concord awakens to a hard freeze. July 7, 1847: President James Polk visits Concord, prompting a parade of bands up Main Street. “The streets were alive with sightseers and from the windows, ladies greeted the president with waving handkerchiefs,” one newspaper reports. July 8, 1822: John Bedel is born at Indian Stream Republic, now Pittsburg. Son of a general (Moody Bedel), he will gain military fame...
This week in Concord history
July 1, 1776: “The Declaration before Congress is, I think, a pretty good one,” delegate Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire writes from Philadelphia. July 1, 1789: The Rev. Israel Evans is ordained as Concord’s second Congregationalist minister, succeeding the Rev. Timothy Walker. The town still pays the minister’s salary and living expenses. Walker, the first minister, served more than 58 years from his ordination in 1730. July 1,...
This week in Concord history
June 23, 1823: The New Hampshire Historical Society, formed earlier in the year in Portsmouth, moves to Concord. It will occupy a room in the State House for three years before moving to North Main Street near Ferry Street. June 23, 1785: A committee is appointed to lay out Main Street in Concord. A final report won’t be drafted until 1798. June 24, 2002: The state Supreme Court, casting aside partisan politics and assuming a key...
This week in Concord history
June 16, 1864: Still short of the state’s recruiting quota for the Union Army, Gov. Joseph Gilmore announces a state bonus of $400 for any man who will sign up for the First New Hampshire Cavalry Regiment. June 17, 1840: On Concord’s Rumford Square, a five-acre field of trees between School and Center streets below Rumford Street, a speech by the Whig Sen. Daniel Webster draws a rousing crowd. The speech follows a “Log Cabin...
This week in Concord history
June 9, 1846: The cannon on Sand Hill in Concord booms the news that John Parker Hale of Dover, an anti-slavery leader, has been elected to the U.S. Senate. June 10, 2003: In their season opener, Concord’s Quarry Dogs eke out a 3-2 win over the Sanford Mainers at Doane Diamond. June 10, 2001: Merrimack Valley wins the Class I softball championship with a 4-1 victory over Monadnock. It’s the school’s first softball title...
This week in Concord history
June 2, 1784: New Hampshire adopts a new constitution. The title “governor,” too reminiscent of British colonial rule, is changed to “president.” To celebrate the event, a parade marches up Main Street in Concord to the Old North Church. June 2, 1819: The State House opens in Concord. The legislative session will be notable for halting the practice of state subsidy for the Congregationalist Church. June 3, 1775: A month and a half...
This week in Concord history
May 26, 1857: U.S. Sen. James Bell of New Hampshire, elected the previous year, dies in office. May 26, 1944: After several destructive incidents, the police join school officials in urging young people not to play with handmade grenades. The grenades are filled with carriage bolts and use match-heads for the explosive charge. Children have been reported making and throwing them throughout the city. May 27, 1727: A...
This week in Concord history
May 19, 1944: Mrs. Charles A. Morin of Monroe Street in Concord hopes a new postal policy aimed at improving communication with prisoners-of-war in Germany will bring word from her son. Lt. Antoine Robert Morin, a pilot, was shot down in February, and his mother received this note, dated Feb. 28: “Dear Folks: Am prisoner of war in Germany. Well and safe. No need for worry. Will write as often as possible. We’ll be together after...
This week in Concord history
May 5, 1944: An epidemic of German measles in Concord has driven the absentee list at city schools above 100. May 6, 2003: Gov. Craig Benson appoints a 12-person task force to determine whether the Old Man of the Mountain should be reborn as a plaster of Paris, rubber or granite version of its former self. Benson says the Old Man of the Mountain Revitalization Task Force will explore what should be done to best memorialize the New...
This week in Concord history
April 28, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson returns to New Hampshire after two days in the Caribbean studying oil refineries. Thomson’s office refuses to say precisely where in the Caribbean area he was. April 28, 1752: On a trapping expedition north of Plymouth, young John Stark leaves camp to check his traps and is captured by Indians. He is beaten, taken north to Canada, forced to run the gauntlet and, after five or six weeks in captivity,...
This week in Concord history
April 21, 1789: When John Adams arrives at Federal Hall in New York after being elected the nation’s first vice president, he is greeted by John Langdon of New Hampshire, president pro tempore of the Senate. There is as yet no oath of office for the vice president, so Langdon simply escorts Adams to his seat at the head of the chamber. April 21, 1881: At 6 p.m., a small closed car drawn by a horse leaves Abbot & Downing...
This week in Concord history
April 14, 1865: Edwin Bedee of Meredith, a captain in the 12th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment, goes to Ford’s Theater. He can see President Lincoln from his seat. After John Wilkes Booth jumps to the stage and flees, Bedee climbs over several rows and enters Lincoln’s box. He holds the president’s head while a surgeon searches for Lincoln’s wound. Bedee suddenly feels the president’s blood running into his hand. “Here is...
This week in Concord history
April 7, 1774: The New Hampshire Assembly, predecessor of the Legislature, reconvenes after a long hiatus. It does not immediately choose a new committee of correspondence, the vehicle by which the colonies share information about acts of Parliament, but will soon do so in response to British efforts to control the Port of Boston. April 7, 1965: The Monitor reports on plans for a new $1.2 million state liquor store on Storrs...
This week in Concord history
March 31, 1968: Nineteen days after Sen. Eugene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the Democratic vote in the New Hampshire primary, President Lyndon B Johnson tells a national television audience: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” April 1, 2000: Concord’s Matt Bonner gets a taste of Final Four basketball as a freshman, scoring four points and grabbing two...
This week in Concord history
March 25, 2000: Concord High defenseman Joe Garofalo has been named Division I hockey player of the year, the Monitor reports. It is the second year in a row he has won the award, which he shares this year with Bishop Guertin goalie Dave MacDonald. March 26, 2002: A new study shows that the combined willpower of town meeting voters across New Hampshire raised more money for conservation this year than any other public or...
This week in Concord history
March 10, 1964: Absentee candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, wins the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary with 36 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, who have campaigned hard in the state, take 22 and 21 percent respectively, and write-in Richard Nixon, the former vice president, wins 17 percent. March 11, 1952: Sen. Estes Kefauver’s grass-roots presidential campaign...
This week in Concord history
March 3, 1972: Four days before the New Hampshire primary, 1,800 people rally for President Nixon at the armory in Manchester. Among them is Gov. Walter Peterson, who beams: “There is no doubt this is Nixon country.” March 3, 1915: The Legislature takes a poll on Prohibition. Of Concord’s 18 state representatives, only one votes in favor. After all, that year there are 33 places in Concord where liquor can be legally sold: 13...
This week in Concord history
Feb. 24, 1976: President Gerald Ford barely defeats Ronald Reagan in the New Hampshire primary. On the Democratic side, the winner is long-shot Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Feb. 25, 1780: Jonathan Harvey is born in Sutton. He will grow up to be president of the New Hampshire Senate in 1818, the same year his brother Matthew is speaker of the New Hampshire House. Feb. 25, 1978: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas comes to New Hampshire...
This week in Concord history
Feb. 17, 1740: John Sullivan is born in Somersworth. He will grow up to be a vain lawyer with British sympathies and an American Revolutionary War general, but not a good one. Feb. 17, 1900: Deep in debt, the 96-year-old Abbot & Downing coach and wagon company is taken over by creditors. Employment has dropped from 300 to 200. The families of Lewis Downing and J. Stephens Abbot will no longer be involved in running the...
This week in Concord history
Feb. 10, 2003: On the eighth day of deliberations in Manchester, jurors acquit John Bardgett, 26, a self-described nursing home “Angel of Death,” of murder by injecting two terminally ill patients with morphine. Feb. 10, 1942: Robert Leon Harris, a 15-year-old student, agrees to leave Rundlett Junior High School “so as not to cause any trouble.” He is the second Jehovah’s Witness in the city to refuse on religious grounds to...
This week in Concord history
Feb. 3, 1968: In Concord, Richard Nixon opens his presidential campaign with a speech in which he says America is a country with a torn soul, a country that needs a new leader who recognizes its “crisis of the spirit” and can restore “the lift of a driving dream.” He then hosts the press for a party at the Highway Hotel. Special guests: Nixon’s 19-year-old daughter Julie and her fiancee, David Eisenhower. Feb. 3, 1944: On the...
1904: A different kind of business
In 1904, the Boston & Maine Railroad found themselves in the Electric Trolley business here in Concord. Around the year 1902 the Concord & Montreal Railroad, a leased line of the Boston & Maine Railroad, obtained a charter to build a new line to Manchester, New Hampshire. During the same period, the Boston & Maine Railroad found themselves in control of the Concord City Street Railway, in prior years known as the...
This week in Concord history
Jan. 27, 1942: Speaking at the swearing-in ceremony for Concord Mayor John Storrs and the city’s aldermen, Gov. Robert O. Blood has this to say about the world war: “We will put an end to this conflict in two years.” Jan. 27, 1943: An anonymous Webster man applies to the Concord War and Price Rationing Board for 600 pounds of sugar. “I make alky mash and need sugar to make it ferment and taste right,” he writes. The board...
This week in Concord history
Jan. 20, 1968: New Hampshire loses its 100th military man in the Vietnam War. He is Eliot Guild of Keene, a 21-year-old Marine medical corpsman. Jan 20, 1926: Nathaniel Lovell, a champion golfer at the Manchester Country Club, dies at the age of 25. The Granite Monthly magazine reports that the cause of death is “blood poisoning, which set in after the opening of a pimple on the golfer’s face.” Jan. 20, 1973: The Monitor...
Looking back to 1861: Busy at the J. C. Norris Bakery
As the early citizens walked the cobbled Concord Main Street late into the evening, well after the lone gas lighter had extinguished his lanterns after midnight, there was still activity in our little town. We had a war to fight and the troops needed to be fed, and that was just what the J.C. Norris & Company (Concord Theatre Building) at 18 South Main Street did all throughout the night. The ovens were blazing back during the...
This week in Concord history
Jan. 13, 1968: Marine Lt. Alfred Russ, 24, of Hancock dies of wounds in Quang Tri Province. He is the 99th serviceman from New Hampshire to die during the Vietnam War. Jan. 14, 2003: Two students from Holderness School are killed in a hit-and-run accident while walking along Route 175A in Plymouth. Jan. 14, 2001: Concord’s Adam Young enjoys his view of the New York Giants’ 41-0 thrashing of the Minnesota Vikings in the...
Looking back: Pembroke Bridge in Concord
The old “Pembroke Bridge,” also known as the Manchester Street Bridge, was designed by Storrs Bridge Engineers. It was built by the City of Concord, replacing the old wood lattice bridge which was built in 1891 taking the place of a bridge that was carried away by the freshet the same year. The original bridge was a toll bridge, one of several toll bridges at Concord that crossed the Merrimack River in the city. The photograph depicts...
This week in Concord history
Dec. 30, 1894: The first meeting is held at Christian Science’s lovely stone Mother Church in Boston. The religion’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, a native of Bow, authorized the building of the Mother Church two years before. Dec. 30, 1993: The state Supreme Court rules that the state has a constitutional obligation to provide adequate public education to all children. Gov. Steve Merrill says that because the state is...
