April 30, 1697: In Penacook along the Merrimack River, Hannah Dustin and two other captives turn on the Indians who kidnapped them and killed Dustin’s newborn child in March. They catch all the Indians asleep, kill 10 of them and return home to Haverhill, Mass. For the 10 scalps they bring with them, they collect a bounty of 50 pounds.
April 30, 1963: New Hampshire establishes the nation’s first modern state-run lottery.
April 30, 1965: Gov. John King cuts the ribbon at the grand opening of the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. Tuition for state residents will be $300 a year. Out-of-staters will pay $800.
April 30, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson says President Nixon has laid the Watergate issue to rest in his nationwide address. “Nixon for almost two years has carried his cross of abuse. He has come out of the ordeal as one of America’s great statesmen.”
May 1, 1891: By custom, Concord’s May Horn ushers in a day of celebrating the final escape from winter. The horn is peculiar to Concord. “The ‘oldest inhabitant’ cannot recall a first day of May in his boyhood when the din of the horn did not reverberate in some wee hour,” the Monitor reports.
May 1, 1903: After 48 years of Prohibition, New Hampshire begins issuing licenses for liquor sales.
May 1, 1925: The Granite Monthly magazine reports approvingly that Concord, Hillsboro, Goffstown, Peterborough and Milford are all planning new high schools. “If we are to believe what some people say, that the young folks of today are headed nowhere in particular and in a hurry to get there, we are at least glad to know they are to be educated on the way.”
May 2, 1966: Former vice president Richard Nixon lands at Concord Airport for a speech at the Highway Hotel. Of the situation in Vietnam, he says: “We cannot tolerate the administration’s apparent resignation to a five to 10-year war in South Vietnam because this will eventually mean an American defeat.”
May 2, 1977: Two hundred seventy-seven of the 1,414 anti-nuclear demonstrators arrested at Seabrook on April 30 are moved to the armory on Concord Heights.
May 2, 2001: The temperature in Concord hits 91 degrees, the hottest it’s been on this date since 1930. Meanwhile, in Laconia, Lake Winnipesaukee’s ice-out is finally declared – 10 days shy of the record for the latest ice-out.
May 3, 1943: Because of rampant juvenile delinquency, Concord churches ask the city to impose a 9 p.m. curfew on teenagers. Police Chief Arthur McIsaac says he’ll consider the request.
May 3, 1967: Concord High School bars the press from covering Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s appearance at the school. Referring to a recent incident in which he was prohibited from speaking at Yale University, Wallace says: “I am glad they are barred e_SEnD– and not me – – this time.” After the CHS speech, Wallace heads for Dartmouth, where screaming, jeering students force him from the speaker’s platform and surround his car after he has left. They pound the car with their fists for 10 minutes amid signs that read “Wallace is a racist.”
May 4, 1848: Robert Hall is crushed to death in the water wheel gearing of the match shop of Jeremiah Fowler in Penacook.
May 4, 1943: The Concord police say they have solved hundreds of thefts with the arrest of 16 high school and junior high school boys. For the most part, the crimes involve objects taken from cars and houses. The boys range in age from 13 to 16.
May 4, 1944: The governor and Executive Council give 35-year-old Horace Jenot of Franklin a full pardon from his six-month sentence in the county house of correction on the condition that he enlist in the Army. Jenot, a father of four, was convicted in February of drunkenness.
May 4, 1944: Fire kills 2,000 chickens at Harold Ford’s farm on Loudon Road.
May 5, 1919: New Hampshire House Speaker Charles Tobey informs a federal agent in Concord that he has received a letter from one Sidney Downing of Lincoln protesting the state’ new anti-sedition law. Although the agent’s investigation will disclose that Downing is a contrary man who always takes the opposite side in political debates, a report filed with the federal government designates Downing a “Bolshevist sympathizer.”
May 5, 1944: An epidemic of German measles in Concord has driven the absentee list at city schools above 100.
May 5, 1945: Maj. Gen. Edward H. Brooks, a Concord native, accepts the battlefield surrender of the German 19th Army. Brooks is commander of the Sixth Corps.
May 6, 1799: Blazing Star Lodge No. 11, Free and Accepted Masons, is “consecrated in ample form” at Union Hall in Ben Gale’s inn. It is the first of innumerable fraternal organizations in Concord.
May 6, 1848: Colonel Dudley “Dud” Palmer, a leader of Concord’s temperance movement, puts forth a resolution requiring the town’s selectmen to enforce the laws against the sale of intoxicating drinks. It passes unanimously.
May 6, 1933: Concord’s trolley system, begun in 1881, shuts down.
