• March 15, 1878: After two trials, Joseph Lapage is executed for the ghastly murder of Josie Langmaid. Miss Langmaid, a student at Pembroke Academy, was dragged into the woods, raped and decapitated the morning of Oct. 14, 1875. A prison historian remarks: “The evidence against him at the best was scant, but his guilt was black as night.” In his last hours, Lapage reportedly says: “Me kill girl.”
March 16, 1680: New Hampshire's first colonial assembly meets in Portsmouth. Today's Legislature has 424 members. That year, just 11.
March 17, 1681: The Governor's Council proclaims this a day of public fasting and prayer for John Cutt, New Hampshire's first colonial governor, who has fallen ill. Cutt soon dies, but New Hampshire will observe Fast Day for more than three centuries.
March 18, 1852: George G. Fogg, Concord editor, Free Soil leader and temperance man, puts the best face on his party's election loss to the Democrats. “The men who have carried this state by rum this year must take the responsibility for it next year,” he writes. “The wedge they have so successfully used to pide and conquer their opponents will, ere long, be found severing the joints and marrow of their organization.”
• March 19, 1967: The calendar says spring is about to start, but few believe it. The low temperature in Concord falls to 16 below zero, tying the record for the coldest March day in the 20th century. This follows a reading of 13 below the day before and 10 below the day before that.
March 20, 1777: Barnstead town meeting voters agree to pay 5 shillings per day for “labor on the highway.” They also vote “not to raise any money for schools.”
March 20, 1972: Mel Bolden of Loudon, chairman of the state Human Rights Commission, calls President Nixon's proposal for a moratorium on school busing to achieve racial integration “a blatant, immoral effort to turn the hands of the civil rights clock back to pre-Civil War days.”
March 21, 1820: An editorial in Concord's New Hampshire Patriot says the Missouri compromise, while disappointing on the whole, “succeeded in rescuing from slavery a vast tract of country, which would otherwise have been expos'd to this dreadful curse.”
