April 9, 2003: In a rally at the State House, state employees and several hundred supporters attack Gov. Craig Benson’s proposed state cuts, rallying against a plan that would freeze wages and send their health care costs soaring.
April 9, 2002: Internships with local businesses, credit for community service and lectures from prison guards are among the suggestions at a meeting of a task force set up to fight Franklin High School’s dropout rate, which is 16 percent, according to the Department of Education.
April 9, 2000: As of the 2000 Census, New Hampshire is the third whitest state in the country, the government reports. Maine, which is 96.9 percent white, is first, followed by Vermont (96.8 percent) and then New Hampshire (96 percent).
April 9, 2000: A party at Rundlett Middle School brings together longtime Concord-area residents with immigrants and refugees who are more recent arrivals. The event is part of a broader effort that educational, social service and business organizations hope will eventually lead to the creation of a multicultural center.
April 9, 1991: After two consecutive days when the temperature reached 85 degrees, Concord settles for a high of 77. It’s apparently a big year for hot streaks: The city enjoyed another historic heat wave at the beginning of February.
April 9, 1975: State representatives from Concord say they have mixed feelings about a plan by Gov. Mel Thomson to convert the Pleasant View home into a treatment center for the criminally insane. (It won’t happen.)
April 9, 1931: Gov. John Winant appoints a commission to determine what industries might be suitable for the prison. The prisoners have been working as contract laborers for a chair company, but a federal law soon to go into effect will prohibit interstate commerce in prison-made goods.
April 10, 2002: Republican gubernatorial candidate Craig Benson, after campaigning for nearly a year, announces his official candidacy with a promise to balance the next budget without raising taxes.
April 10, 2001: The police arrest a Penacook man and charge him with arson and burglary in connection with recent vandalism at the United Church of Penacook.
April 10, 2000: Gov. Jeanne Shaheen picks Phil Stanley, a department of corrections administrator in Washington state, to be New Hampshire’s next corrections commissioner. He will succeed Hank Risley, who was killed in a helicopter crash while on a sightseeing tour in Hawaii.
April 10, 1991: The Concord planning board rejects a plan by developer Barry Stem to build a hotel and conference center on Broken Ground. It is just one segment of his development project, which also includes an 18-hole golf course and nearly 500 luxury homes. None of it will ever be built.
April 10, 1865: At 2 p.m., news of Robert E. Lee’s surrender reaches Pittsfield. In a letter to her son at Dartmouth College, Mrs. Drake of a prominent family in town describes what happens next: “I assure you all business was suspended for the remainder of the day and evening. They acted as though they thought the Year of Jubilee had come. Indeed, it was a time of general rejoicing without any distinction of sect, sex, or party. Bells were rung, cannons were fired, flags were raised, torches burned, etc. I thought that might satisfy but no, on Tuesday evening they had a great time. They had a very large torch light procession including the whole school. It looked splendidly and 2 large fires were built at each tavern. . . . They drew 2 cart loads of pitch and stump wood to fix their fires. They first set a pole in the ground, perhaps 20 feet long, then built a sort of a staging around the bottom and filled it full of pitch wood. Then took four barrels one on top of the other and letting the pole run through them and filled each with pitch woods which illuminated the village nicely. We had our blinds open and it was as light as day in our house.”
April 10, 1865: A huge celebration in Concord marks the end of the Civil War. Mayor Moses Humphrey orders the city’s fire engines decorated and ready to move to the State House by 4:30 p.m. Bands play, cannons boom, church bells peal. After nightfall, there is a “general illumination” of the city and a 400-gun salute is fired.
April 11, 2003: The New Hampshire Supreme Court upholds a 2001 Concord Planning Board decision that told the Richmond Co. it couldn’t build a shopping center in the old railroad yards near the South End marsh. The decision rewards the South End residents who have spent nearly three years fighting the project and reinforces the authority of planning boards.
April 11, 2002: The state Supreme Court rules that New Hampshire’s public school testing system and minimum school standards are toothless and therefore fail to guarantee students the adequate education to which they are entitled.
April 11, 2000: Gov. Jeanne Shaheen announces she will nominate Superior Court Chief Justice Linda Dalianis to the state Supreme Court. Dalianis will become the first female justice on the state’s highest court.
April 11, 1986: Chosen by the New York Yankees five years earlier as a 19th-round draft pick, Bob Tewksbury of Concord makes his first major league start at Yankee Stadium. He defeats the Milwaukee Brewers 3-2.
April 11, 1793: A tragedy called The Revenge plays at the Town House, on the current site of the Merrimack County Courthouse. It is the first play to be staged in Concord. The city’s Mirrour calling it “a virtuous, sentimental and rational amusement to the respectable inhabitants of the town.”
April 11, 1941: At the University of Bristol in England, on the night after a severe bombing of the city, Prime Minister Winston Churchill confers an honorary degree on John G. Winant of Concord. Winant, a former New Hampshire governor, is the new U.S. ambassador to Britain.
April 11, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson warns state college students not to streak. “Running naked through public buildings and on the streets is an affront to most of our citizens. It is an exercise in depravity. If tolerated, it can only lead to the eventual loss of whatever sense of morality still exists in America.”
April 11, 1984: Fire ravages the 125-year-old St. Paul’s church in Concord, leaving only the walls, bell tower and half the roof intact. Firefighters have to smash a century-old stained glass window to ventilate the building and the floor beneath the altar collapses.
April 12, 2003: The police arrest 90 people and twice fire pepper gas to dispense a bottle-throwing crowd of about 4,000 that spills into downtown Durham streets after New Hampshire loses the NCAA hockey championship game.
April 12, 2002: Fraser Papers Inc., a Connecticut paper company, files an agreement in bankruptcy court to buy Berlin’s idled paper mills for at least $30 million.
April 12, 2001: The state Senate votes, 23-1, in favor of limiting the term of chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court to five years. According to the legislation, the position would be rotated among the court’s five members.
April 12, 1990: Charles Simic of Strafford, longtime English professor at the University of New Hampshire, wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The World Doesn’t End.
April 12, 1917: Six days after the United States declares war on the Axis powers, the Legislature passes a law prohibiting walkouts, strikes and lockouts in New Hampshire industries that produce war materiel. A state Committee of Public Safety is established to report any union or other radical activity to federal agents based in Concord.
April 12, 1827: On Fast Day, Rev. Nathaniel Bouton, 27, delivers the first temperance sermon in Concord. Bouton’s words at the Old North Church ignite local participation in a social movement that will last more than a century. Bouton asserts in his sermon that he has investigated and found that “the use of ardent spirits in Concord” is “universal.” He claims that the 1,400 men in Concord consumed nearly 14,000 gallons of liquor in 1825. The Concord Temperance Society will be formed three years later. By 1843, nearly half of the city’s adult residents will have signed a prohibition pledge.
April 12, 1973: After the state Supreme Court rules his search of confidential tax files illegal, Gov. Mel Thomson asserts that “Each branch of government must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.” Senate Vice President Harry Spanos accuses Thomson of lacing himself above the law and says “that philosophy we must and should combat.”
April 12, 1994: New Hampshire’s two U.S. senators, Bob Smith and Judd Gregg, are rated the nation’s most frugal spenders and taxpayers’ best friends by the National Taxpayers’ Union. On a scale of 0-100, Smith scores an 88; Gregg an 87. The average Senate score: 45.
April 13, 2001: The state Supreme Court rejects an appeal brought by convicted murderer James Dale. He will continue to serve a 60-year prison sentence for the rape and murder of a 6-year-old Hopkinton girl.
April 13, 2000: The New Hampshire House votes, 343-7, to authorize an investigation into whether state Supreme Court Chief Justice David Brock deserves to be impeached. “The revelations that have come to light are troublesome,” says Rep. David Hess of Hooksett. Brock will eventually be impeached, but the state Senate will acquit him at trial.
April 13, 1945: Responding to the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt the previous night in Warm Springs, Ga., John G. Winant of Concord, the U.S. Ambassador to England, says: “The greatest American of our age is dead.”
April 13, 1775: With Revolutionary fervor running high, the town of Chester raises a company of 50 men “to go against any enemy that shall presume to invade us.”
April 13, 1984: The school board in Danvers, Mass., hires away Concord School Superintendent Calvin Cleveland. During his six-year tenure in Concord, Cleveland was best known for an effort to close three neighborhood elementary schools. One, Millville School, did close. The other two, Dewey and Eastman, survived the cut.
April 14, 1865: Edwin Bedee of Meredith, a captain in the 12th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment, goes to Ford’s Theater. He can see President Lincoln from his seat. After John Wilkes Booth jumps to the stage and flees, Bedee climbs over several rows and enters Lincoln’s box. He holds the president’s head while a surgeon searches for Lincoln’s wound. Bedee suddenly feels the president’s blood running into his hand. “Here is the wound, doctor,” he says.
April 14, 1865: At 5 p.m., Congressman Edward H. Rollins, a Concord Republican, stops by the White House to seek a pass for a constituent to visit his wounded son in an army hospital. President Lincoln comes downstairs to oblige Rollins, writing a note to the secretary or war. It is the last official business Lincoln will conduct before going to dinner and the theater – and possibly the last time he will sign his name. After Lincoln is assassinated at Ford’s Theatre, Rollins keeps the dated, signed note.
April 14, 1865: In Washington, D.C., Surgeon William Child of the 5th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment begins a letter to his wife Carrie in Bath, N.H., with this sentence: “Wild dreams and real facts are but brothers.” Child has just returned from Ford’s Theatre, where he sat across from President Lincoln’s box and witnessed the president’s assassination. “Will peace ever come again to our dear land,” Child writes, “or shall we rush on to wild ruin?”
April 14, 1945: In response to Gov. Charles Dale’s call for a day of mourning for President Roosevelt, the Monitor does not publish and all businesses close.
April 14, 1993: The Concord Fire Department, generally in the business of extinguishing fires, starts one: Environmentalists hope a controlled burn on 10 acres of grass at the Concord Airport will improve conditions for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.
April 15, 1861: Three days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the first call for troops reaches Concord by telegraph from Washington, D.C., at 8 a.m. Friends rush across to the Phenix Hotel to awaken Edward E. Sturtevant, a popular police officer and former printer. Sturtevant rushes to the State House and, fulfilling his fondest wish, becomes New Hampshire’s first Civil War volunteer.
April 15, 1928: Augusta Pillsbury of Manchester makes history, becoming the first legislator in the nation to have a baby while in office.
April 15, 1725: Captain John Lovewell, who three months earlier collected 1,000 pounds for the scalps of 10 Indians he caught sleeping at Province Lake, leads an excursion of 46 men on a hunt for more. They will meet and fight a band of Pequawkets under Chief Paugus. The Indians will kill Lovewell, and only 11 members of his party will make it back to their base in Nashua.
April 15, 1987: Pete du Pont, the governor of Delaware, brings his presidential campaign to Keene. With no local organization, he spends the day by himself looking for voters to chat with. “Missing, however, was any attempt to make real connection with someone who might carry on his campaign locally in his absence. . . . Du Pont was observing some of New Hampshire’s primary rituals but without comprehending their purpose,” writes Dayton Duncan in a campaign history.
April 15, 1865: At 2 a.m., the telegraph at the Eagle Hotel brings news that President Lincoln has been shot. At 7:22 a.m., Lincoln dies in Washington. Word spreads quickly in Concord, and crowds gather in the streets. At 9 p.m. many drift to former president Franklin Pierce’s mansard-roofed home on Main Street near Thorndike Street. A lantern illuminating his face, Pierce expresses his “profound sorrow and regret,” telling the crowd: “My best wishes to you all and for what we ought to hold most dear – our country – our whole country.”
