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, 1824: After a 36-year fight during which Hopkinton vied with Concord to become the seat of a county that was to be called Kearsarge, the first Merrimack County courthouse opens on its current site.
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, 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, 1985: Bernhard Goetz, the so-called “subway vigilante” who fled New York after shooting four teens and landed in Concord, is to be returned to Manhattan today. Merrimack County jail guard Thomas Barton says Goetz told him: “What happened had to be done, but I’m sorry it happened.”
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. 4, 1950: The temperature in Concord climbs to 68 degrees, making this the warmest January day of the 20th century.
Jan. 4, 1973: Gov. Mel Thomson gets his first term off to a secure start by having all the locks changed in executive offices at the State House.
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, 2003: A federal judge has denied Gary Sampson’s plea to escape the death penalty, the Monitor reports. Sampson is accused of killing Robert “Eli” Whitney of Penacook along with two Massachusetts’s men. He will be found guilty in Massachusetts and sentenced to death, the first time the state has issued such a sentence since 1973.
Jan. 5, 1864: This is the deadline for New Hampshire to send 3,768 troops to the field, including 132 from Concord. The state and city have met their quotas without a draft. Veterans re-enlisting to answer this call received $502 in bounties, new recruits $402. Concord has paid out $64,100 in bonuses and received $52,400 in reimbursements from the state.
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. 5, 1943: In his Monitor editorial, Editor James M. Langley calculates that “we” have completed 20 years of editorial writing, averaging 2,250 words a day 300 days a year. The editorial is headlined: “13,500,000 FUTILE WORDS.”
Jan. 5, 1973: A New Hampshire Hospital security guard is fired because his hair is too long to suit Concord Police Chief Walter Carlson. Guards must have Concord police authority to function. By summer, the New Hampshire Human Rights Commission will order the guard back to work.
Jan. 5, 2002: The Concord police found firsthand evidence of methamphetamine’s creeping presence last month in an attic crawlspace on Northeast Village Street, the Monitor reports. There, in the Heights home, officers found a pH tester and chemical bottles. Methamphetamine, also known at “crank” and “speed,” has long been a top concern for law enforcement officials in the West and Midwest. But only recently has the narcotic turned up in New England, law enforcement officials said.
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, 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.
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, 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, 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, 1943: Twenty-one-year-old Richard B. Lynch, working on an expansion project at Concord Airport, is caught in the chains of a steam shovel owned by his father and crushed to death.
Jan. 6, 2003: Several Penacook residents ask the city to save their beloved, but most likely doomed, Rolfe barn: They ask the city to seize it through eminent domain. The request is made in a petition filed just minutes before city hall closes. After months of battles between history buffs and property developers, the Penacook Historical Society will own the barn.
Jan. 7, 1904: At its annual meeting, the First Church of Christ Science thanks Mary Baker Eddy of Concord for her gift of $120,000 toward the Concord church, now under construction.
Jan. 7, 1942: A tannery is proposed for the large Penacook factory once used by New Hampshire Spinning Mills. Nearby residents plan to protest.
Jan. 7, 1942: Concord starts a three-day spell of bitterly cold weather with a low temperature of 15 below zero. The next day it’ll be 25 below, and the day after that, the temperature will fall to 22 below.
Jan. 7, 1965: Construction workers in Concord use doors from a dozen demolished houses to form a barrier to close the sidewalk along Pleasant and South streets, where the new $3.5 million federal building is under construction.
Jan. 8, 1878: A temperature of 35 below zero is recorded in Concord, an all-time record cold reading for the city that will stand for more than 65 years.
Jan. 8, 1895: The Supreme Court and State Library buildings are dedicated in Concord.
Jan. 8, 1990: The city council elects Jim MacKay mayor of Concord. He defeats the incumbent, Liz Hager.
