April 22, 2003: Criticizing what he calls the Bush administration’s “lasting damage” to the environment, Democratic Sen. John Kerry promises to “make environmental justice the law of the land” and to create a new enforcement office within the Environmental Protection Agency if he’s elected president in 2004. By strengthening and enforcing environmental protections, the United States actually could create more jobs and boost economic recovery, Kerry tells a crowd of about 100 environmentalist activists gathered at the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests for an Earth Day celebration.
April 22, 1746: Indians break into Woodwell’s Garrison, west of modern-day Contoocook, and take eight occupants to Canada. Two will die in captivity.
April 22, 1861: Meeting at the South Congregational Church, a group of Concord women organizes an effort to supply soldiers with “articles necessary to their comfort in the field.” They have raised $200 and resolve to spend $150 on flannel for shirts for the First New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
April 22, 1947: John Harrigan is born in Littleton. Harrigan will become a reporter for the Nashua Telegraph and the New Hampshire Sunday News before taking over as publisher of both the Coos County Democrat and the News and Sentinel of Colebrook. When reporters, both near and far, are looking for the voice of the North Country, they will often turn to Harrigan.
April 22, 1995: Poet Jane Kenyon dies of leukemia at her home in Wilmot.
April 22, 1943: Denis Parker is born in Manchester. He will be named director of the State Employees Association, the union representing New Hampshire’s 10,000 state workers, in 1972.
April 22, 1864: The Sanborn block, home to the offices of the New Hampshire Patriot, is destroyed by fire.
April 23, 1945: So far, it appears that Mrs. John Maken of Manchester will be the state’s entry in a national contest aimed at identifying the mother with the most children in the service. Nine sons and a daughter-in-law of Mrs. Maken have been in uniform.
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 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, 1933: Racetrack gambling becomes legal in New Hampshire and debuts at Rockingham Park in Salem. Gov. John Winant lets the proposal become law without his signature.
April 24, 1992: The Concord Monitor publishes its last afternoon edition. Henceforth it will be a morning paper.
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, 1847: The Portsmouth Journal reports that neither the 40-year-old federal prohibition on the slave trade nor the ships built in the Portsmouth Navy Yard for the African Squadron have managed to stop the wholesale capture of blacks in Africa. “So expeditiously do the fast sailing vessels employed in the slave trade manage their business,” the paper reports, “that they will run into some inlet, where four hours suffice for them to take in wood, water, and several hundred slaves.”
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 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, 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, 1902: The statue of Commodore George H. Perkins of Hopkinton is dedicated behind the State House. Perkins was a Civil War naval officer who helped Admiral David Farragut take New Orleans and win the Battle of Mobile Bay. As the tablet on the statue records, Farragut called Perkins “the bravest man that ever trod the deck of a ship.”
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 27, 1987: U.S. Rep. Bob Smith is among a group offering a $1 million reward to any Southeast Asian defector who frees an American POW.
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, 1977: Gov. Meldrim Thomson says a planned protest at the Seabrook nuclear plant site is “cover for terrorist activity,” adding: “Once the demonstrators occupy the site, they do not plan to leave alive.”
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 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 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, 2000: The House Judicial Conduct Committee announces it has decided not to investigate state Supreme Court Justice John Broderick or retired justice William Johnson. The committee votes to continue investigating allegations of misconduct by Justice Sherman Horton and Chief Justice David Brock.
April 28, 1752: On a trapping expedition north of Plymouth, young John Stark leaves camp to check his traps and is captured by Indians. He is beaten, taken north to Canada, forced to run the gauntlet and, after five or six weeks in captivity, released when a ransom of 40 pounds is paid.
April 29, 2002: After months of campaigning, Democrat Martha Fuller Clark formally announces her second run for Congress, laying out her priorities – protecting children and Social Security and making life better for families.
