Aug. 28, 2000: The board of directors of First Night New Hampshire announces it won’t hold its annual New Year’s Eve celebration this year. The organization has accumulated debts over the past three years, in part due to cold weather and a 1999 bomb scare.
Aug. 29, 1862: While ministering to soldiers of the 2nd New Hampshire Infantry at Second Bull Run, Harriet P. Dame of Concord is captured. She is taken to Stonewall Jackson’s headquarters and will be released the next day. As long as the 2nd serves, Dame will be its “angel of mercy,” according to Maj. J.D. Cooper. “Many days,” he will write, “she has stood by the side of our noble, patriotic sons who have gone to their long homes, doing all in her power to alleviate their sufferings, and soothe their sorrows in the dying hour.”
Aug. 29, 1900: Workmen erecting electric light poles find two rusted tin boxes buried by a dirt road in Bow. The boxes contain documents stolen from the State House more than five years earlier in a heist that netted $6,000 in cash.
Aug. 30, 1790: A town meeting approves spending 100 pounds to build a “town house” on land near Main and Court streets. The town house will be a meeting place for townspeople and the General Court.
Aug. 30, 1824: Amos Parker, editor of Concord’s weekly Statesman, goes to Boston to invite the Marquis de Lafayette to visit Concord during the Revolutionary War hero’s U.S. tour. Lafayette agrees to come after the dedication of the Bunker Hill Memorial the following June. Parker describes Lafayette as “a dignified personage, in his 60s, grown portly,” wearing buff-colored cotton pants, a swans’-down vest, a blue broadcloth coat with gilt buttons, a beaver top hat and plain shoes.
Aug. 30, 1862: After a federal draft call for nine-month volunteers, the city of Concord offers a bounty of $100 to any resident who will sign up by Sept. 15.
Aug. 30, 1970: At the Highway Hotel in Concord, the Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, Pa., honors 10 New Hampshire people for efforts to maintain “the American way.” Among the honorees are Publisher William Loeb and gubernatorial candidate Meldrim Thomson Jr.
Aug. 31, 1866: The Rev. Nathaniel Bouton, author of a Concord history a decade earlier, is named state historian. He will hold this position for 11 years, during which he will compile 10 volumes of provincial and state papers for publication.
Aug. 31, 1892: The statue of antislavery Sen. John P. Hale is completed outside the State House.
Aug. 31, 2000: Author Russell Banks visits with inmates at New Hampshire State Prison. “In many ways,” he tells them, “you guys are my ideal readers.”
Sept. 1, 1782: The Rev. Timothy Walker, who has served as Concord’s Puritan minister from around the time of its settlement in 1730, collapses while preparing for a service and dies. He is 77 years old.
Sept. 1, 1939: Germany attacks Poland. The Concord Monitor’s lead editorial says: “We feel certain that try as hard as we may, we cannot stay out of the war if it is at all prolonged.”
Sept. 2, 1816: From Concord, where he is living in the North End, Samuel F.B. Morse writes to his parents that he is engaged to a local girl, Lucretia Walker. “Never, never was a human being so blest as I am,” he writes.
Sept. 2, 1947: Plans to install the city’s first parking meters downtown draw the ire of Concord residents. “I will make one pledge. I never will put 10 cents into a meter in order to shop. I will park my car over on Concord Plains and walk in first,” writes Charles H. Nixon in a letter to the editor.
Sept. 2, 2002: Concord police arrest a man they say kidnapped two teenagers at knifepoint at Walmart on Loudon Road. James McLaughlin will be arraigned on two counts of kidnapping, one count of robbery, one count of felon in possession of a deadly weapon, and possession of a dangerous weapon while committing a violent crime.
Sept. 3, 1861: Thirty-one train cars carry the Third New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment out of the Concord station.
Sept. 3, 1914: Richard F. Upton is born in Bow. He will become a prominent Concord lawyer and speaker of the New Hampshire House. In 1949, concerned with light voter turnout in previous New Hampshire presidential primaries, he will initiate legislation to make the process more meaningful. Long before his death in 1996, he will be known as the father of the state’s first-in-the-nation primary.
Sept. 3, 1991: Speaking to the Concord Rotary, Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas remembers the real Concord rotary – the one on his way from home in Massachusetts to Dartmouth College when he was a student 30 years before. He used to hitchhike to school and back, he said, and “I spent a lot of time at the Concord rotary freezing my rear end off. Those of you who drove past me – I resent it very much.”
Sept. 3, 2001: A standoff closes Sewalls Falls Road and re-routes holiday traffic on Interstate 93. After 4½ hours, the police take a man into custody.
