March 4, 1861: New Hampshireman Benjamin Brown French is the chief marshal for the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. The event goes off without a hitch, and French rewards himself with a good seat for the speech. “I got a position where I could hear every word and was delighted,” he writes in his diary.
March 4, 1777: Concord’s town meeting votes to “break off all dealings” with attorney Peter Green, Dr. Phillip Carrigain and merchants John Stevens and Nathaniel Green. Although the four are among 156 area men who have signed the Association Test, an oath of loyalty to the Patriot cause, they are suspected of being Tories.
March 5, 1740: After years of disputes over Massachusetts claims on New Hampshire, King George II approves the boundary between the two colonies. The decision increases New Hampshire’s size by 3,500 square miles and costs Massachusetts 28 chartered towns, including Suncook, Bow, Concord, Penacook, Webster, Salisbury, Dunbarton, Weare, Hopkinton, Warner and Bradford.
March 5, 1975: Attorney General Warren Rudman tells lawmakers that “a boom in crime is the one sure bet casinos will allow us” if New Hampshire legalizes casino gambling.
March 6, 2003: Comparing taxes to an addiction, Gov. Craig Benson says that he’ll veto a tobacco tax if one makes it through the Legislature. “I am not standing for any new taxes,” Benson says. “We can live within our means, and we will live within our means.
March 6, 2000: Officials investigating the death of the 73-year-old Concord man known as “Cigar Bob” issue a warrant for the arrest of his former roommate. Dwayne Thompson, 46, who has not been seen since Robert Provencher’s body was found, is charged with second-degree murder.
March 6, 1972: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, tells a Keene audience that Richard Nixon is no different from his immediate predecessors in lying to the public about U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. “Richard Nixon has killed, wounded or made homeless more than 3 million persons, including 2 million in Cambodia and one third of the population of Laos,” Ellsberg says.
March 7, 1780: Concord town meeting voters elect a prosecutor to find out who “pulled down the house of Andrew Stone, and see what provision they will make for the support of his wife.” Stone was a soldier from Concord in the Continental Army. Apparently in his absence, a town history reports, “one of Stone’s daughters did not behave so well as the neighbors thought a faire and chaste maiden should do and they undertook to correct her manners by pulling the house down. Whether the girl behaved any better afterwards, tradition saith not.”
March 7, 1798: Crowds converge on Concord, which has grown to 2,000 inhabitants, to celebrate the ordination of the Rev. Asa McFarland, third minister of the village’s Congregational Church. The church is state-sanctioned and tax-supported. Accepting the call, the 28-year-old McFarland tells townspeople he has prayed that God will make him “an instrument to promote your spiritual happiness.” A grand ball at Stickney’s Tavern, on Main Street just up from the ferry crossing, celebrates the event.
March 7, 1825: A team of horses crossing the frozen Merrimack in Concord falls through the ice.
March 8, 2003: By a slim margin, Pembroke voters approve at $17.5 million budget, restoring $124,963 of more than $700,000 in cuts that the school board made to the bottom line. There will be no aide to staff the elementary school library and kids will have to pay to participate in athletic programs, but the Pembroke School District will not have to cut any of its teachers.
March 8, 1973: Gov. Mel Thomson makes a surprise visit to the state hospital kitchen and declares that the patients are being fed “poorly and revoltingly.” He orders samples of the food to be brought to the State House to be viewed by legislators and reporters.
March 9, 2003: The state attorney general’s office has spent the past year investigating priests who broke the law by molesting children, the Monitor reports. But they turned up another problem as well: priests who violated their vow of celibacy by having sex with women, with men and with other priests.
March 9, 1812: Town meeting voters in Concord declare “that no swine be allowed to run at large on the road from Concord bridge to Boscawen bridge under a penalty to the owner of 25 cents for each offense.”
March 9, 1973: Gov. Mel Thomson says the state’s boundary squabble with Maine isn’t just about water – it also concerns land. Thomson contends all of the Isles of Shoals belong to New Hampshire, including Duck, Appledore, Malaga, Smuttynose and Cedar, considered part of Maine since 1635.
March 10, 2003: Hundreds pack Representatives Hall to protest Gov. Craig Benson’s two-year spending plan before the House and Senate finance committees, where many programs would be scaled back. Benson calls his proposal his “kitchen table budget” – just as families do when times are tough, he said, state leaders must sit down together, distinguish “wants” from “needs” and decide which luxuries they’ll do without. Paul Stokes, the president of the State Employees Association, declares that no family would make the choices that Benson made. “We can’t tell Grandma she can’t live here anymore,” he said.
March 10, 2002: If there is such a thing as a law designed with noble intent that had results even better than expected, the New Hampshire presidential primary could serve as a prime exhibit, the Monitor reports. Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Upton’s brainchild. The law that Upton (then a state representative from Concord) conceived sought to make the votes of New Hampshire citizens really count.
March 10, 2001: Pembroke voters overwhelmingly reject a plan to share school board control with three towns that send their high school students to Pembroke Academy. Allenstown, Chichester and Epsom each sought a voice on the board.
March 10, 2000: A 7-year-old boy crossing Loudon Road on his way to Concord’s Dame School is struck by a pickup truck and seriously injured. The accident inspires residents of the Heights to press city officials for better traffic signals and more clearly marked crosswalks.
March 10, 1777: The Legislature orders the state’s first constitutional Fast Day, to be celebrated April 16. The holiday will not die out until the 1990s.
March 10, 1991: A funeral tribute is held at the Monitor for former longtime editor Tom W. Gerber, who died Feb. 22. Steve Winship, Gerber’s old friend and fellow Dartmouth College alum, places a green hood over Gerber’s typewriter. On the hood is this motto: “Words, words, words.”
March 10, 1863: Ship owner Daniel Marcy, a Copperhead from Portsmouth, is elected to the U.S. Congress from the First District.
March 10, 1852: An amendment on the ballot would overturn the constitutional provision that only Protestants may run for political office in New Hampshire. Voters reject the amendment by a 5-4 majority.
March 10, 1978: The Executive Council approves 32-year-old Tom Rath of Concord to succeed David Souter as attorney general. Souter, 38, who held the job for seven years, is approved as a superior court judge. Gov. Meldrim Thomson Jr. made the nominations. Rath’s salary will be $33,500 a year.
March 10, 1853: The town of Concord holds its last town meeting – and then votes to become a city by a vote of 828-559.
March 10, 1964: Absentee candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, wins the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary with 36 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, who have campaigned hard in the state, take 22 and 21 percent respectively, and write-in Richard Nixon, the former vice president, wins 17 percent.
