Dec. 31, 1999: Despite a bomb threat, First Night celebrations wrap up without incident. Enthusiasm, however, is hard to find. “It doesn’t feel like New Year’s Eve,” one would-be Concord reveler laments. “There’s not a lot going on,” another adds. “And with no snow, it’s even worse.”
Dec. 31, 1869: A group of young men from Concord gathers to greet the New Year. “One raised his glass and pledged upon his honor as a man, that not a single drop of intoxicating liquor should pass his lips in 1870.” Impressed, another poured the party’s whiskey down the drain. The Monitor approved, reporting: “These men have made a good beginning for 1870.”
Dec. 31, 1984: Concord holds its first “First Night” celebration.
Dec. 31, 1984: Bernhard Goetz turns himself in to the Concord police, confessing that it was he who shot four teenagers in a New York subway nine days before. Police Chief David Walchak is at a loss as to why Goetz came to New Hampshire. Between the shootings and his surrender, Goetz spent several days in the state, staying in motels at North Sutton, Keene and Sunapee.
Dec. 31, 1999: Newspapers of New England, the Monitor’s parent company, donates its former building on North State Street to Riverbend Community Mental Health.
Jan. 1, 2000: About 50 people from the state and the private sector huddle in an emergency operation center in Concord, ready to respond to whatever havoc the dreaded Y2K computer glitch may bring. To their relief, the rollover of the calendar passes without incident.
Jan. 1, 1819: The Phenix Hotel, built by Abel Hutchins, opens on Main Street in Concord as “a house of entertainment.”
Jan. 2, 1784: The Legislature grants Concord official townhood.
Jan. 2, 1788: At Concord’s town meeting, townspeople commission Timothy Walker Jr. to lobby the Legislature and neighboring towns for the creation of a new county.
Jan. 2, 1985: At his arraignment in Concord, suspected subway shooter Bernhard Goetz agrees to go home to New York City and face the charges. Wearing red berets, five members of the Guardian Angels, a group of young people who patrol urban streets to deter crime, attend the proceeding. “If this gentleman sat down, and these kids were bothering him, then we would consider that self-defense and we would praise him,” one of them tells a reporter. “If he pre-meditated, then we would condemn him.”
Jan. 3, 2001: TV crews and print reporters from across the region swarm around state Rep. Tom Alciere during his first day at the State House. Alciere, whose internet writings that advocate killing police officers have just become mainstream news, insists, “I am not a nut.”
Jan. 3, 2000: Concord Mayor Bill Veroneau opens his fifth term in office with a pledge to explore seriously the possibility of bringing a semi-professional baseball team to the city. Before the fall, the city will announce it has landed just such a franchise: the Concord Quarry Dogs, who will play their 2001 home games at Memorial Field.
Jan. 3, 1942: New Hampshire Prison Warden Charles B. Clarke worries that because of the war, there will be too little steel for the state’s 1943-44 motor vehicle plates. There is plenty of steel for 1942-43 plates; prisoners have already made 35,000 of the 50,000 needed.
Jan. 3, 1952: The Concord City Council rejects plans for a $1.75 million jet fighter base for the National Guard at Concord Airport. Officials call the plan too disruptive for residents of the Heights.
Jan. 3, 1870: An aurora borealis appears. At 4 a.m., “the northern portion of the sky was nearly all aflame,” a patriotic observer writes. Directly overhead, “Streamers of red, white and blue were seen streaking up from the horizon.”
Jan. 4, 2001: Elizabeth McLaughlin, a 101-year-old resident of Concord’s Havenwood-Heritage Heights Retirement Community, gets some extra attention for a day after being invited to the governor’s inaugural address at the State House. “It (was) a day I never expected,” McLaughlin says later. “I’m not an important girl at all.”
Jan. 4, 1950: The temperature in Concord climbs to 68 degrees, making this the warmest January day of the 20th century.
Jan. 5, 1996: The early-morning low temperature in Concord is a brisk 18 below zero.
Jan. 5, 1791: The Legislature gathers in Concord’s new “town house” near Main and Court streets. The Legislature still moves its meeting site from town to town but will often convene at the town house until the Granite State House is finished in 1819.
Jan. 5, 1813: The first products from state prison industries go on the market: axes, made in the prison’s blacksmith shop, at 10 shillings or $1.50 by the dozen.
Jan. 5, 1877: Protesting his innocence to the end, Elwin W. Major is hanged at the state prison. He was convicted of poisoning his wife, but after a new investigation, Major’s lawyer made an eloquent plea for clemency. The governor himself visited Major in his cell and, after an undisclosed conversation, declined to commute the death sentence. Major wears elegant black to the gallows, as though dressed for a dinner party. He kisses his jailer and absolves him of blame.
Jan. 6, 1790: George Hough, 31, who has hauled in a hand press and type cases from Windsor, Vt., publishes Concord’s first newspaper, The Concord Herald and New Hampshire Intelligencer. His office is a one-story print shop on what will one day be the State House grounds. Printed under the weekly’s nameplate, Hough’s motto is: “The Press is the Cradle of Science, the Nurse of Genius, and the Shield of Liberty.” A later journalist will call “Pa” Hough “a man without guile, who never made an enemy, whose only delusion was that all men were as honest as himself.”
Jan. 6, 1942: The school board has decided that in the event of an air raid, Concord students will remain in school. Principals, teachers and janitors will be trained in air raid protection techniques.
Jan. 6, 1904: Arthur C. Jackson of Concord, who has purchased Daniel Webster’s birthplace as a summer home, proposes to dismantle the room in which Webster was born and remove it temporarily to St. Louis. There he hopes to set it up as New Hampshire’s exhibit at the national fair commemorating the Louisiana Purchase.
Jan. 6, 1853: A train derails and topples on the way to Concord, killing 11-year-old “Little Benny” Pierce. His father, the president-elect Franklin Pierce, and his mother are traveling with him but are unhurt. Jane Appleton Pierce is “completely distraught” and will never recover from the loss. After the funeral, the body will be carried down Main Street and Concord residents will pay their respects. Benny will be buried alongside his brother, who died at the age of 4 in 1843.
Jan. 6, 1823: The first New Hampshire Statesman is published out of the Carrigain Block on North Main Street in Concord. Publisher Luther Roby and Editor Amos Parker are among a group of Democrats who have had a falling out with Isaac Hill, a party leader and editor of the New Hampshire Patriot.
