April 22, 1861: Meeting at the South Congregational Church, a group of Concord women organizes an effort to supply soldiers with “articles necessary to their comfort in the field.” They have raised $200 and resolve to spend $150 on flannel for shirts for the First New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
April 22, 1943: Denis Parker is born in Manchester. He will be named director of the State Employees Association, the union representing New Hampshire’s 10,000 state workers, in 1972.
April 22, 1864: The Sanborn block, home to the offices of the New Hampshire Patriot, is destroyed by fire.
April 23, 1945: Thirteen-year-old Larry West of Concord is killed with a 12-gauge shotgun. The weapon discharges accidentally while he is climbing a tree to shoot a porcupine.
April 23, 1843: Convinced that the end of the world is near, a considerable number of people in Concord and elsewhere neglect all worldly business and give themselves up to prayer. A few become insane, some destitute.
April 24, 1992: The Concord Monitor publishes its last afternoon edition. Henceforth it will be a morning paper.
April 24, 1853: Miffed that Franklin Pierce, now president, has relegated him to a lowly clerical job, Benjamin Brown French reminisces in his journal about the early days of their friendship. In 1831, on the way to serve in the New Hampshire House, the two met in Hopkinton, Pierce on horseback, French in a chaise. In Concord, “we took rooms at Gass’s Eagle Hotel, nearly opposite each other, & then commenced a friendship that has been, on my part, almost an affection. From that day to this I have not wronged Frank Pierce in thought, word or deed.”
April 24, 1900: Harriet P. Dame dies in Concord at the age of 85. She was renowned for having ventured south with the 2nd New Hampshire Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. She served as a nurse and helpmate to the soldiers and was captured at Bull Run.
April 25, 2002: The Concord Fire Department’s new ladder truck, which caused hullabaloo among city councilors, fire administrators, fire union members and mayoral candidates last summer and fall, has arrived, the Monitor reports. The $688,000 truck is called a “tower ladder” because there’s a platform, or bucket, at the top capable of holding up to three people.
April 25, 1996: A packed house comes to the City Auditorium to hear five poets read in honor of Jane Kenyon, who was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died a year earlier. Among the readers are two Pulitzer Prize winners – Maxine Kumin and Charles Simic – and Kenyon’s widower, Donald Hall.
April 25, 1975: President Ford visits the state and is greeted at Concord airport and introduced to the Legislature by Gov. Meldrim Thomson. Thomson, however, has let it be known that he’s promoting a challenge to Ford in the presidential primary from former California governor Ronald Reagan – and, failing that, Thomson plans to run himself.
April 25, 1893: Edward H. Brooks is born in Concord. A graduate of Concord High and Norwich University, he will serve in both world wars, rising to the rank of lieutenant general. A highlight of his long, distinguished career will be leading the Second Armored Division onto Omaha Beach. His pision will also be the first Allied force to enter Belgium.
April 25, 1902: The statue of Commodore George H. Perkins of Hopkinton is dedicated behind the State House. Perkins was a Civil War naval officer who helped Admiral David Farragut take New Orleans and win the Battle of Mobile Bay. As the tablet on the statue records, Farragut called Perkins “the bravest man that ever trod the deck of a ship.”
April 25, 1965: Monitor political columnist Leon Anderson predicts a broad-based tax is coming soon: “We expect the day will dawn sooner than many think when Gov. John King and others will find themselves out in the political cold for refusing to sense New Hampshire needs a fat broad-based tax to let a bit of sunshine into homes and farms now buried in taxes. It has long been so-called good politics to oppose either a general sales tax or a state income levy. But the tide is turning.”
April 26, 2001: Bancroft Products, a Concord nonprofit known for hiring refugees and people with disabilities, has laid off 260 employees, the Monitor reports. Just six months ago, when the economic outlook was rosier, the company had been planning to add some 130 jobs.
April 26, 2000: The Executive Council unanimously approves the appointment of Linda Dalianis to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, making her the first woman named to the state’s highest court.
April 26, 1948: On the first day of spring vacation, Concord students take to the streets of downtown brandishing placards. Their cause: a new swimming pool in West Concord. The state Board of Health closed the old one as unsanitary in 1945, and a committee of the city’s alderman has recommended against spending $110,000 to build a new one. Some of the signs read “Swimming Will Make Us Strong” and “Oh Give Us Water!”
April 27, 2003: At the Concord Community Music School, Dana Gioia, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, tells art leaders from across the state that he is ready to rebuild and revitalize the endowment. “The arts are one of the primary and primal ways of knowing the world,” he said. “They tend to embrace and enhance . . . not only building your humanity but building your empathy.”
April 27, 1861: The city of Concord appropriates $10,000 to aid the families of local volunteers who go off to war. It expects the state to reimburse it, and for the most part it will. By the end of the year, the city will have doled out $3,000 to soldiers’ families.
April 27, 1987: Fire breaks out in the south end of the Legislative Office Building in Concord. Hundreds gather to watch as a cool wind whips the flames pouring from the roof. Water streams out the door and down the steps into the street. The building suffers extensive smoke and water damage.
April 28, 2003: People from across New Hampshire come to two, two-hour public hearings in Concord to register their dissatisfaction with the $2.7 billion House budget proposal. The sessions are dominated by talk of cuts to social services: adult care programs, mental health treatment programs and Medicaid, among others.
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.
