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 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 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 24, 1992: The Concord Monitor publishes its last afternoon edition. Henceforth it will be a morning paper.
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 division will also be the first Allied force to enter Belgium.
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 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, 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, 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 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.
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 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 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 28, 2001: A Concord doctor has been charged with sexually assaulting a patient in her bed at the state’s psychiatric hospital, the Monitor reports. The doctor is also accused of giving the patient addictive drug prescriptions in exchange for sex.
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 29, 1964: In an editorial, the Monitor defends its opposition to the recently initiated state lottery against criticism from Manchester publisher William Loeb. The Monitor calls the lottery “a new venture born under a cloud of doubts.” Loeb has accused the Monitor of being “a minority gone mad and demanding what it wants.” The paper, he writes, is guilty of “vindictive dog- in-the-manger tactics and sabotage.”
April 29, 2003: The former Blue Cross-Blue Shield building may not be vacant much longer, the Monitor reports. Local developer Steve Duprey purchased an option on the property this winter and now has several interested tenants, including the College of Lifelong Learning. The college wants to consolidate its administrative offices and local classrooms somewhere in Concord. The chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire also may relocate his office there.
