•March 8, 1968: In a press release on the Vietnam War, U.S. Sen. Norris Cotton of New Hampshire says: “No longer can honeyed words and cheering predictions conceal the stunning truth – we are taking a beating and can't win, or at least can't win under present strategy.”
March 8, 1987: Ray Barham's first column appears in the Concord Monitor. Barham is serving life without parole at New Hampshire State Prison for a 1981 murder.
March 8, 1912: Meldrim Thomson Jr. is born in Pittsburgh. He will be a three-term New Hampshire governor in the 1970s.
March 9, 1943: A winter for the ages continues as the temperature in Concord falls to 16 below zero. Just three weeks earlier, the city suffered through its coldest day ever recorded, when the mercury fell to 37 below.
March 9, 1812: Town meeting voters in Concord declare “that no swine be allowed to run at large on the road from Concord bridge to Boscawen bridge under a penalty to the owner of 25 cents for each offense.”
March 9, 1964: Dr. Robert O. Blood, former New Hampshire governor and chairman of an uncommitted slate of GOP delegates on the next day's presidential primary ballot, says he has contacted Richard Nixon to “ascertain the position” of the former vice president. Nixon tells him: “Although I have taken no part in the New Hampshire primary, I believe that all Americans will be watching the results there.” Nixon will receive 15,500 write-in votes.
March 10, 1777: The Legislature orders the state's first constitutional Fast Day, to be celebrated April 16. The holiday will not die out until the 1990s.
March 10, 1853: The town of Concord holds its last town meeting – and then votes to become a city by a vote of 828-559.
March 11, 1734: Its right to self-government recognized seven years after the first white settlers arrive, Rumford in Essex County, Mass., convenes its first town meeting at 2 p.m. In time the town will be known as Concord, N.H.
March 12, 1968: Defying pre-election polls, Democrat Eugene McCarthy wins 42.4 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, deeply wounding the re-election hopes of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, a landslide winner four years earlier, wins the primary but is the choice of less than half the voters in his own party. Nineteen days later, Johnson will tell the nation he will not seek re-election.
March 13, 1993: People hunker down for what television has hyped as the “storm of the century.” Concord gets 17 inches of snow. Most roads will be clear by morning.
March 13, 1782: The Legislature meets in Concord for the first time. The site is “the Old North,” the First Congregational Church. The building will burn in 1870. It was on the site of the current Walker School.
March 13, 1852: For the third time in three years, local voters reject a plan to turn Concord from a town to a city. The vote is 458 in favor and 614 against.
March 14, 1968: Thomas J. Saltmarsh, a 19-year-old paratrooper from Concord, is killed in action near Saigon. He is the 16th local man to die in combat during the Vietnam War.
March 14, 1947: The Monitor editorializes in favor of the construction of a city swimming pool – and a plan to charge swimmers a fee: “It is no more unreasonable to expect swimmers to pay something for this privilege than it is to expect golfers at Beaver Meadow or tennis players at Memorial Field to pay enough to cover the costs of their sport.”
